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S T Q Contents SEAGULL THeatRE QUARTERLY Issue 27/28 Dec 2000 Editor 2 Anjum Katyal ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Editorial Consultant Samik Bandyopadhyay 4 Assistants INTRODUCTION Sayoni Basu Samik Bandyopadhyay Chaitali Basu Paramita Banerjee Sumita Banerjee Sudeshna Banerjee Sunandini Banerjee 9 Padmini Ray Chaudhury POINTS OF CONSIDERATION Vikram Iyengar 10 Design COLLOQUIUM ONE : Naveen Kishore THE DIRECTORS Assisted by Sunandini Banerjee 126 COLLOQUIUM TWO : WOMEN IN GROUP THEATRE Cover photograph Kali Banerjee as Karim in the Anushilan Sampraday production 260 of Ispat (1956). A NOTE ON THE PARTICIPANTS End papers Front: a poster of LTG’s Kallol (1965). Back: a scene from LTG’s production 263 of Kallol: NOTES ON PERSONS REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT Shekhar Chatterjee (Sardul Singh) and Samaresh Banerjee as a naval rating officer on board Khyber. 266 NEW RELEASES FROM SEAGULL BOOKS Published by Naveen Kishore for The Seagull Foundation for the Arts, 26 Circus Avenue, Calcutta 700017 Printed at Laurens & Co 9 Crooked Lane, Calcutta 700 069 1 Acknowledgements This special double issue of STQ, focusing on contemporary Bangla Group Theatre, has been 3 years in the making. Between the original conception and planning, and its final actualization, we have benefited from the contribution of innumerable persons, some of whom have even left and moved on in the interim. All persons who have worked for STQ on the matter in this issue have been acknowledged as ‘assistants’ on the contents page. Samik Bandyopadhyay has been closely involved with this issue, and with the larger Seagull project of documenting and disseminating theatre in Bengal, from the very beginning. His considerable knowledge, his insights and his close experience of the theatre scene have helped make this issue possible, and we thank him for his valuable inputs. At the final stage, Sudeshna Banerjee was entrusted with the responsibility of undertaking all the verification, annotation, and research necessary before the vast amount of material could appear in coherent published form. She adds a personal note of thanks here: I would like to acknowledge the help and support of all those wonderful people whom I have approached with requests for loaning a photograph or a rare periodical, identifying the actors/ actresses in a still, even checking the date of a production, all of whom have been ever so patient and obliging in helping me compile all those minute details. I had even taken the liberty of ringing some of them up at home at unearthly hours, trying to clear a doubt, or even cross-checking a reference. My thanks are due to all their family members, who have been kind enough to take a message from me, passed it on to them, and even taken the trouble of calling me up again and answering my queries. I have had the privilege of working with Sri Samik Bandyopadhyay on this issue, and learning so much about theatre— the things unsaid, the anecdotes that enliven and illuminate a point 2 about a production, the theoretical debates that often do not surface. We are grateful to Sri Nripendra Saha, a former editor of the periodical Gandharva, and now of Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, for providing stills from Bijan Bhattacharya’s production of Debigarjan, letting us reproduce material from a rare issue of Padapradeep (1956), the Tagore centenary issue of Gandharva (1961), and from the bilingual monograph-album, Actor, Playwright, Director: Bijan Bhattacharya [Calcutta: Paschimbanga Natya Akademi, 1993]. We are grateful to Smt Bhadra Bose, who has allowed us to use some rare stills of the Anushilan Sampraday production of Ispat (including the one used on the cover) and to Sri Asit Bose, who has helped us identify the actors/actresses from the Shambhu Banerjee photographs. Smt Sova Sen allowed me to look through the contact positives of photographs taken by the Late Sri Shambhu Banerjee, now in the archives of the Utpal Dutt Foundation for International Theatre Studies, and choose some stills for this volume of STQ. We also take this opportunity to thank the family members of the Late Sri Banerjee. We acknowledge with gratitude all the help we have received from Sri Jiten Bose, one of the earliest members of Anushilan Sampraday and a charming raconteur who would quote from memory specific dialogues from the play as he identified all the actors/actresses in the stills from Ispat, and gave us permission to reproduce stills from the 1960 Anushilan Sampraday production of Bisarjan in his personal collection. We thank Sri Meghnad Bhattacharya and all the members of Sayak, who have been extremely prompt in providing us with photographs and in answering all our queries. Sri Kumar Roy and the members of Bohurupee, Sri Bibhash Chakraborty, Sri Arun Mukherjee, Sri Ashok Mukherjee, Sri Jnanesh Mukherjee, Sri Rudraprasad Sengupta, Sri Nilkantha Sengupta, Sri Ram Mukherjee, Sri Manoj Mitra, Sri Koushik Sen, Sri Suman Mukherjee, Smt Ketaki Dutta, Smt Chitra Sen, have patiently answered my queries either in person or over the phone. We thank all of them. Sri Prakash Bhattacharya has been extremely cooperative and we thank him for providing the productional details of the play Shwet Santras. We thank Smt Chaitali Chakrabarty for providing us the year of birth and death of her mother, the Late Smt Shelly Pal. We thank Sri Rudraprasad Sengupta for permission to reproduce stills from the 17th Nandikar Theatre Festival Brochure. We thank Smt Pratibha Agrawal, Sri Debashis Roy Chowdhury, Smt Gitasree Dey and all the staff and research assistants at Natya Shodh Sansthan for patiently looking through the material in their archives and answering our queries. This is the first of several STQ issues dealing with theatre in Bengal, and there is still matter, gathered and commissioned over these years, that is pending publication in subsequent issues. We thank all contributors and interviewees for their patience and help in providing us with photographs and other related materials. 3 Introduction The annotated transcripts of the two colloquiums, held in 1998, that constitute the present issue of STQ are part of a larger STQ project to profile the contemporary Bengali theatre experience in the state of West Bengal. The first phase of the project has a limited scope—to (i) offer an intimate view of theatre in West Bengal in the fifty-odd post-Independence years, through the reminiscences and personal testimonies of some of the most significant directors, who have also been the leading actors; (ii) record a free and frank exchange of critical views and evaluations among directors, actors and actresses of the problems that they have had to confront, and the different individual positions they have assumed; (iii) invite the women directors and actresses, who have consistently grown in stature and importance from the 80s, to have a colloquium to themselves; and (iv) open out a more theoretical discourse on the dramatic text in the given setting and circumstances and historical exigencies of theatre in Bengali (or Bangla, as the language is now being more and more frequently described). The present issue, the first in a series, covers only the second and the third items of the agenda. In a sense, the two round tables, faithfully recorded and transcribed (with the bare minimum of editorial intervention or excision), will draw the reader into the hub of things—and debates and controversies— while the rest of the material, forthcoming in a later issue, will hopefully give them a more objective distance, a perspective and a history. The reader may find it useful to have a ground sense of the theatre scene as a whole, before plunging into the strikingly unselfconscious and revealing conversations among theatre workers (the Bengali theatre community takes pride in the term ‘workers’, preferring it to artists/artistes, and describes all its theatre activities and companies alike as part of Group Theatre, with a conscious predilection for a non-commercial, voluntary, democratic, self-motivated, freely creative and collaborative project), often breaking into acrimonious clashes, but never hiding their genuine confusions, uncertainties and indecisions. Though the Group Theatre in West Bengal has never been conceptually defined as such, the theatre groups who identify themselves with this denomination have generally operated on the model set by the group Bohurupee in 1948. A Group Theatre group would normally grow around an actor-director commanding the allegiance of a band of theatre ‘workers’, initially at least 4 committed to serving theatre as a cause or a mission in whatever capacity or function the director assigned him/her. As Bibhash Chakraborty acknowledges in the course of the recorded colloquium, ‘This entire identification of a group with the director has been a kind of a tradition here.’ Initially at least, in the early days of Bohurupee, which has survived for over 50 years now at a stretch and still retains most of its original ‘rules’ and practices, it was part of the orientation/training of a fresh recruit to be trained to surrender one’s ego and be prepared to carry out any obligation for the theatre, however demeaning it may be. Trained to be theatre ‘workers’ rather than actors or technicians, individuals would be engaged for years in the daily chores of organization, production and performance before making a stage appearance. The obligatory invisible life behind the scenes was both training and trial for a dedicated worker in the group theatre. While the deliberate control of the actorial ego, built into the training and practice of the group, might have been a precautionary reaction to the conventions and attitudes of the Victorian actor-managerial tradition, a colonial hangover in India in the professional repertory companies that dominated the general theatre scene in the 50s, there was little ideological transparency underlying the direction.