SEAGULL Theatre QUARTERLY 244 Theatrelog Issue 29/30 Jun 2001 Acknowledgements
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2 Acknowledgements 3 Introduction 7 ‘My kind of theatre is for the people’ KUMAR ROY 37 ‘And through the poetry we found a new direction’ SHYAMAL GHO S H 59 Minority Culture, Universal Voice RUDRAPRA S AD SEN G UPTA 81 ‘A different kind of confidence and strength’ Editor AS IT MU K HERJEE Anjum Katyal Editorial Consultant Samik Bandyopadhyay 99 Assistants Falling in Love with Theatre Paramita Banerjee ARUN MU K HERJEE Sumita Banerjee Sudeshna Banerjee Sunandini Banerjee 109 Padmini Ray Chaudhury ‘Your own language, your own style’ Vikram Iyengar BI B HA S H CHA K RA B ORTY Design Sunandini Banerjee 149 Photograph used on cover © Nemai Ghosh ‘That tiny cube of space’ MANOJ MITRA 175 ‘A theatre idiom of my own’ AS IT BO S E 197 The Totality of Theatre NIL K ANTHA SEN G UPTA 223 Conversations Published by Naveen Kishore 232 for The Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Appendix I 26 Circus Avenue, Calcutta 700017 Notes on Classic Playtexts Printed at Laurens & Co. 9 Crooked Lane, Calcutta 700 069 234 Appendix II Notes on major Bengali Productions 1944 –-2000 S T Q SEAGULL THeatRE QUARTERLY 244 Theatrelog Issue 29/30 Jun 2001 Acknowledgements Most of the material collected for documentation in this issue of STQ, had already been gathered when work for STQ 27/28 was in progress. We would like to acknowledge with deep gratitude the cooperation we have received from all the theatre directors featured in this issue. We would especially like to thank Shyamal Ghosh and Nilkantha Sengupta for providing a very interesting and rare set of photographs; Mohit Chattopadhyay, Bibhash Chakraborty and Asit Bose for patiently answering our queries; Alok Deb of Pratikriti for providing us the production details of Kenaram Becharam; Abhijit Kar Gupta of Chokh, who has readily answered/ provided the correct sources. We are also grateful to Samik Bandyopadhyay for allowing us to use material from his personal collection of theatre brochures, photographs and memorabilia. We thank Debashish Roy Chowdhury of Natya Shodh Sansthan for being so prompt in answering our queries. 2 Introduction The present issue of STQ is in a sense a continuation of STQ 27–28, published earlier this year, both issues devoted to a particular trend in theatre in the state of West Bengal in eastern India that calls itself Group Theatre. With its brief critical introductory overview of the trend and elaborate transcripts of two colloquiums featuring a cross section of the major players in this trend— actor-directors, actresses and actress-directors—the earlier issue touched more on organizational and economic issues (and the issue of gender, rarely articulated at such length, in this context) than on the creative and ideological issues inherent in the trend under review. The complementary sequel allows some of the pioneers and veterans of the trend to locate and project their individual positions in this history of a little over half a cntury beginning 1948. The format chosen for these personal statements was more testamental than dialogual; the interviewer merely helping the more active interviewee in most cases. I was more a sympathetic observer—and even admirer—than a critic. Inadequately documented, most of the work of theatre ‘workers’ (as they prefer to describe themselves) has, like most theatre works anyway, receded to oblivion, and sharing memories with the makers can be a way of reliving/ reviving/reconstructing them. That was the consideration that kept me from debating/disputing/challenging the testaments. And there was of course the sheer joy of recalling the productions and performances as I had seen them. For the interviewees too there was the satisfaction of having ‘made’ experiences that lived in the memory of the viewer. Memory is a major component in theatre history. Memory can of course be a distorting mirror with its often wish-fulfilling revisionism. Memory replayed in dialogue can however have a corrective objectivity which has been the goal of this anthology of first person narratives shared with a common viewer. The three major provocations that have defined creativity in the so-called Bengali Group Theatre have been the strongly entrenched Victorian ‘heroic- melodramatic’ performative style as an inheritance from colonial enlightenment, acting as nostalgia and reference point; a strong humanist concern oscillating between leftist realism and modernism; and a whole series 3 of contradictions played out and consumed in the battle of an initially democratically conceived group as collective and the individual artist with his/her personal agenda, peculiar to the semi-professional culture of this theatre, so unlike both the repertory system and the experimental little theatres in most countries. The professional repertory theatres, with their own playhouses and companies booked for a production that should last for around five hundred performances, have gone out of business in Calcutta one by one in the last two decades. Two of the buildings have burnt down in the recent past in intriguingly similar circumstances, raising speculation about housing promoters burning them down to allow them to make use of the prime land for commercial building enterprises. There has been some ceremonial mourning for the fall of the old theatres, but not much real regret, for the old style was dead anyway, with the old theatre in its last phase drawing on the standing of film stars past their prime and past cinema! Readers will find several interviewees harking back to their memories of the great old actors, the last generation of them still acting in the 1950s; the thrill of their ‘heroic’ performances giving them their first feel of theatre—and drawing them to theatre. In the fifties, the other theatre—what would be labelled Group Theatre another two decades later—had already appeared on the scene, with a different set of values. The old acting style, on its way out, found a fresh lease of life in the jatra, a popular, travelling, theatre-in-the-round performance tradition. Originally predominantly musical and operatic (several jatra companies still use the term ‘opera’ in their names), operating out of the larger district towns and performing to large rural congregations, the jatra began changing in the 1920s, and by the 1960s, had come to set up their offices and rehearsal spaces in Calcutta, and taken over conventions and acting styles from the city’s declining old theatres. The new theatre workers and audiences alike still retain emotional affiliations with the old larger-than-life acting style, that in its jatra reincarnation in the fifties and sixties, came to draw fresh urban audiences and led to a revival of the jatra. Torn between the contradictory pulls of the Old and the New, several major figures of the new theatre like Utpal Dutt, Shyamal Sen, Shyamal Ghosh, Asit Bose, Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay and Bibhash Chakraborty chose to do stints in the jatra, more often as playwright-directors, but sometimes as actors too—with unequal success. After their short stints in the jatra, which exposed them to audiences much larger than what they had been accustomed to, they came back to their own theatre, and sought to enlarge its scope and appeal with a more mixed bag of tricks and devices, hoping to indigenize and popularize their more elitist, experimental products. There were others too who did not join the jatra, but could still draw on its musicality and performance qualities to enliven their own theatre. The Group Theatre productions so long almost exclusively committed to realism of one sort or the other, chose other subjects—folk tales, fairy tales, period pieces, historical and mythological themes—and in some cases biographical plays on old musicians or theatre performers in earlier times, to accommodate the heroic or musical modes. In the case of Utpal Dutt, interest in the jatra followed on the collapse of his Minerva Theatre project to give the radical theatre a regular site in Calcutta’s theatre district. Dutt’s ideological commitment to a theatre for the people had led him to take a lease on one of Calcutta’s old playhouses in the hope that he would be able to reach the traditional playgoers of the city, who had once patronized and supported the old theatre in that old playhouse. The older theatre performed at Minerva in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been marked by a spectacularity that had become a Minerva sign. Dutt, in his Minerva productions, went for an even richer spectacularity, 4 but obviously accomplished through a dramaturgy, fundamentally different from the earlier models both aesthetically and technically. Instead of Hamlet (Hariraj in his Indian incarnation) making his stage entry on horseback, with the horse illuminated with a chain of small bulbs stretching from its head down and along its flanks, Dutt transformed the entire stage to the quarterdeck of a World War II battleship with gun turrets from where the mutinous sailors fire salvos. Dutt’s Little Theatre Group did draw large audiences at Minerva—far beyond the ‘enlightened’ urban middle-class, which remains the usual Group Theatre audience—for its Angaar and Kallol ; but flopped with its masterpiece Manusher Adhikarey. The collapse of the Minerva project however was not due to any fall in popularity as such, but to dissension in the ranks of the group and political differences with the official Left. Dutt chose the jatra as his next field of operation—to reach the people. left without a theatre of his own, Dutt accepted offers from the professional jatra companies to write and direct plays for them. He was quite thrilled with his first exposure to this other theatre, with its last generation of great veterans, singer- actors, singer-actresses, and female impersonators, performing to ten thousand plus audiences in the open air, charged to loud applause again and again throughout a performance.