Mrityumukhar Ek/Dui

Birth. And death. And in between - a moment - life. A moment, or an eternity. The game of life is not a game in the conventional sense. There are no players, and no winning or losing. Once the pieces are placed in the starting position, the rules determine everything that happens later. It is impossible to look at a starting position or pattern and see what lies in the future. The only way is to follow the rules of the game. A chill may come while it is still
summer outside, or the washed and faint echoes of yesterdays may bump against the lost hills. And we wait, hung in between birth and death, living the moment eternally. And yet, somewhere along the way, we forget this wonderful gift that is ours, forget the fragrances, the tastes, the sights, the touches, the sounds, the silences, that make this life so intensely desirable. Forget to celebrate life, that is so short, and yet, so complete.
Mrityumukhar Ek/Dui – two short pieces – based on Luigi Pirandello and Krishna Sobti’s writings, staged in 2004, brings out the passion that is life, the ecstasy that is life, the obsession that is life, the party that is life – if only we know how to live it.

Credits –
Lights – Badal Das
Music - Saswati Biswas
Stage – Ajit Roy
Translation – Saswati Biswas and Salil Bandyopadhyay
Direction – Saswati Biswas

Cast - Mrityumukhar Ek
The Violin Player – Amartya Ghosh
The Man – Asesh Choudhury
The Traveller – Dhrubajyoti Das
The Woman – Anita Roy

Cast - Mrityumukhar Dui
Mother – Saswati Biswas
Daughter – jagori Bandyopadhyay

The Telegraph_28.6.2004

Tomari Matir Kanya

The war of Troy is over. The Greeks have won, not by valour, but by a foul trick. For ten long years they besieged the city of Troy, but could not go beyond its impregnable walls, for these were built by two powerful immortals, the Sun God Apollo and the God of the High Seas, Poseidon. So they duped the Trojans into accepting a huge wooden horse as a token oftheir submission, which the Trojans themselves hauled inside the city walls in their elation as a symbol of victory. The nightlong celebrations left the Trojans tired and unsteady, and then the Greeks struck, for there were soldiers hidden inside the horse. Troy was swept clean of all its men in one night.
And now only the women are left, including those of the royal household. Queen Hecabe, wife of King Priam, mother to the gallant warrior Hector, the handsome Paris, the innocent Polyxena and the seer priestess Cassandra, is distraught in her grief. The Greeks, led by King Agamemnon , had struck Troy when Paris eloped with the gorgeous Helen, wife of the Greek king, Menelaus . Now their vengeance is complete, with the women of Troy beingmeted out to the Greeks as concubines, servants and paramours, and even the last male, the infant son of Hector and his wife Andromach, being killed.The God Poseidon and the Goddess Athene have plotted to wipe out the Greeks in a tornado after they sail for home . The Greeks are under the sentence of death, but before retribution descends on them, they make it clear, by their various outrages, how much they deserve it. They are doomed from the start, and proceed to pile up the count before our eyes. On the other hand, we are at a loss to understand how the Trojan women, whohave led their lives as per the moral tenets of society, have deserved their terrible fate. Do we then see that nothing the individual can do can have meaning in a world on the brink of annihilation for reasons and by means that the individual is unable to grasp and over which he appears to have no control?
In Tomari Matir Kanya, based on The Trojan Women of Euripides, staged in 2002, we decided to emphatically state that this is NOT a play about the plight of women in times of war. This is about the plight of human beings in times of war. This is NOT a play about thedefeat of a country. This is about the death of a civilization . This is about the loss of freedom and dignity, and ultimately about the loss of faith in all that is good and sacred.


Credits –
Lights – Badal Das
Music - Saswati Biswas
Stage – Khaled Choudhury
Translation – Salil Bandyopadhyay
Costume and Direction – Saswati Biswas

Cast -
Poseidon – Asim Sen
Athena- Jagori Bandyopadhyay
Hecabe – Alokananda Bhattacharya
Chorus – Bisnupriya Basak, Jagori Bandyopadhyay, Soma Kar, Arundhati Chakraborty, Saswati Biswas
Cassandra – Tania Banerjee
Andromache – Senjuti RoyMukhupadhyay
Talthibius - Dhrubajyoti Das
Guard – Asim Sen


The Telegraph March 21,2003

The Hindu March 16,2003

Kaalbela

The highly gripping drama, A Man For All Seasons, by Robert Bolt, was staged in 2000 as Kaalbela. The play focuses on the conflicts between Sir Thomas More and king Henry VIII,
and deals with crafty and expedient politicking practised in the name of politics. And in the process, raises a few fundamental questions much pertinent to our country and time. On the eve of the 50th anniversary of our independence, we chose to take a look at what the country has achieved and lost post our independence.


Credits –
Lights – Badal Das
Music and Costume - Saswati Biswas
Adaptation and Direction – Salil Bandyopadhyay

Cast –
Common Man – Kanchan Dasgupta
Thomas More - Krihnakishore Mukherjee
Richard Rich – Dhrubajyoti Das
Duke of Norfolk – Sankar Ghosh
Margaret – Anita Roy
Cardinal Wolsey – Asesh Choudhury
Cromwell –Asesh Sengupta
Chapuys – Debkumar Chatterjee
William Roper – Ananda Bhattacharya
King Henry – Arindam Basu
The woman – Bishnupriya Basak
Archbioshop Cranmer – Asish Gupta

Tomar Andhar Tomar Alo

What is the role of violence in today's world? Is it an inevitable concomitant of the human condition? Is it a necessary evil? Or is it a tool that can be used to achieve a more humane world? Peter Shaffer raises these questions in his romantic play The Gift of the Gorgon - and through them he tries to understand the riddle that is man.
We chose to stage Tomar Andhar Tomar Alo, in 1999, based on Shaffer’s play, because we felt that a time has come when we have to decide which is the good and which is the evil. The turning away of the face and pretending that violence is not there until it reaches my doorsteps, - or tackling organised violence with organised violence to secure a better world for our children. Do we - the ordinary, the common, the frightened, the socially conscious, the enlightened, the responsible, the educated citizens have any concrete roles to play in this? Do we remain silent because it does not touch our lives directly - because it is too big and we are too small? The struggle described in this play is also a metaphor for the inner struggle between good and evil faced by all human beings. The play forces us to delve into ourselves to know how essential violence is to society - and to choose for ourselves the right path.

Credits –
Lights – Gautam Ghosh
Music, Stage, Translation and Direction – Saswati Biswas

Cast-
Helen – Saswati Biswas
Maid – Chati Choudhury
Philip – Pradip Biswas
Edward – Gautam
Damsinski – Sankar Ghosh
Jarvis - Asesh Choudhury
Jo Beth – TrinaNileena Banerjee
Others – Anita Roy, Abhijit Choudhury, Ananda Bhattacharya, Bishnupriya Basak, Ananda Bhattacharya, Asish Gupta

Asangato

Director Salil Bandyopadhyay turned playwright with Asangato, staged in 1991. There are three families in this play - two nuclear families, and a joint family. The lives of four couples, three contemporaneous and one belonging to the previous generation – and two children, evoked either through actual presence or through allusion, forms the densely textured background of the play.

The spotlight is on 16 year old Reshmi, the only child of an upper middle class working couple, who had tried to electrocute her parents one night, and on her psychiatrist, a man embittered by his investigation of the individual and the social psyche , and badly in need of treatment himself. As he gropes for the reason as to why Reshmi tried to kill her parents, we witness an intriguing yet natural transference of relationship between the two.

Credits –
Lights – Badal Das
Music - Sumanto Mukhopadhyay
Direction – Salil Bandyopadhyay

Cast-
Reshmi – Saswati Biswas
Dr Chanchal Pal – Salil Bandyopadhyay
Nurse – Anita Chatterjee
Meenakshi - Arundhati Bandyopadhyay
Somen – Joy Sungupta
Partha – Abhijit Choudhury
Dadu – Chuni Dutta
Dida – Sabita Raha

Khelaghar

Khelaghar, based on the Time and the Conways by J B Priestley, staged and adjudged the best production of 1992 by the Paschim Banga Natya Akademi, is the story of a family moving through time.


It is about the dreams and disillusionment of a particular family and of an age, about coming to terms with life and the consequences of failing to do so, and in the ultimate analysis, about the human condition itself.

Credits –
Lights – Tapas Sen
Music - Partha Sengupta
Adaptation and Direction - Salil Bandyopadhyay

Cast-
Mother – Bijoylakshmi Barman
Namu – Arundhati Bandyopadhyay
Binu – Pritha Goswami
Sumi – Monika De
Mithu –Jinia Guha
Barko – Asesh Choudhury
Chotko – Sumanto Mukhopadhyay
Topu – Joy Sengupta/ Debasish Roychoudhury
Shukla - Susmita Mukhopadhyay

Bisarjan

The need to focus on the shackles of superstition and conservatism deepened within the next two years, propelling us towards Rabindranath’s Bisarjan in 1990. It provided us with an apt metaphor for our predicament. A line from the play was quoted in all our advertisements, tickets and posters ‘ Man loses his humanity in the name of God’.
It was evident to us that the characters like Raghupati and Chandpal were still active on the arenas of religion and politics, busy devising stratagems to obscure the truth, and that our politics had failed to check the waywardness of organised religion, just as religion has been unable to infuse contemporary politics with a sense of morality. We had but no inkling then that the frenzied demolition of the Babri Masjid would take place in the very near future. We had been invited to perform this play at the Rabindra Janmotsav and the Sampradayik Sammhati Utsav organised by the government of West Bengal in 1991, as well as at the festival organised at Delhi, in the same year, by Sahitya Akademi, Lalit Kala Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademi to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Rabindranath’s death.

Credits –
Lights – Tapas Sen
Music - Partha Sengupta
Set Design – Gautam Basu
Stage – Ashoke Banerjee
Costume – Debashish Roychoudhury
Direction - Salil Bandyopadhyay

Sada Ghora

Two contradictory impulses have always been at war inside man’s mind and in human society - the urge to move forward and the backward pull of conservatism; our march towards freedom is constantly impeded by social forces working to preserve the status quo.
Ibsen’s play – Rosmersholm - about the ceaseless conflict between society and the individual, as well as within the human psyche, had seemed particularly relevant to us in the last years of the 80-s. So we staged Sada Ghora in 1988 – an adopted version of the play.

Credits –
Lights – Joy Sen
Music – Partha Sengupta
Stage – Debashish Roychoudhury
Adaptation and Direction - Salil Bandyopadhyay

Cast-
Ramala - Arundhati Bandyopadhyay
Mahim -Sumanta Mukhopadhyay
Niren -Dwijen Bandyopadhyay
Mastermoshai – Babu DattaRoy
Akhil Moitra – Debasish Roychoudhury
Maid – Arunita Roychoudhury

Raja Lear

Shakespeare’s expose of social decay in King Lear has lost none of its relevance three hundred years later. We see the same human drama of greed, envy, ambition, and desire being enacted around us every day. We share Lear’s lack of insight, even though we’re not sure whether we’ll be delivered from darkness, as Lear was. This perception had prompted us to stage Raja Lear in 1986 in the hope that it might illuminate, at least to an extent, the dark times in which we live.

Credits –
Lights – Joy Sen
Music - Shekhar Biswas
Set and Costume Design – Arundhati Bandyopadhyay
Stage – Kamal Sengupta/Arup Dey
Translation and Direction - Salil Bandyopadhyay

Cast -
Lear - Salil Bandyopadhyay
Cordelia/Fool -Arundhati Bandyopadhyay
Kent – Sumanta Mukhopadhyay
Cornwall – Bijoy Chakraborty
Edgar – Diptosh Majumdar
Frans – Syamalendu Bandyopadhyay
Goneril – Pari Bandyopadhyay
Glostar – Biswarup Purakayastha
Albani – Debasish Roychoudhry
Edmund – Babu DattaRoy
Oswald – Bidyut Chakraborty
Burgundy – Arup De
Reegan – Sanjukta Basu

Medea

Our next production went back to a world 2500 years older than today. We were drawn towards Euripides because of his unflinching depiction of the decadence of his age, an era which had witnessed the decline of the civilization of Athens. His ability to interpret his milieu accurately attracted us, for we were trying to gain an insight into our own time, to come to grips with our own heritage of decadence. “ The Greeks have surpassed in barbarity even those that they call barbarians “ – this observation from another play by Euripides had seemed to us to be a fitting curtain raising cue for our production of Medea in 1983, a play which illustrates the destructive potential of the resentment and rage bred by years of exploitation by the powers-that-be.

Credits –
Lights – Tapas Sen
Music - Partha Sengupta
Stage – Manu Datta
Translation – Abhijit Sen
Direction - Salil Bandyopadhyay

Cast -
Medea -Arundhati Bandyopadhyay
Jason - Ranjan Sarkar /Sumanta Mukhopadhyay
Creon -Bijoy Chakraborty
Aegeus – Abhijit Sen
Nurse – Sabita Raha
Tutor – Subho Basu/ Biswaroop Purakayastha
Messenger – Babu DattaRoy
Chorus – Papia Adhikari, Basabi Bhattacharya, Srabani Dasgupta
Others - Soumitra Ghosal, Babai Raha.

Tapaswi-O-Tarangini

Our next production in 1981 marks a significant departure from its predecessors in its emphasis on the purely personal and the eternal rather than on the political and the contemporary.The vast panorama of contemporary politics, history and myth shrinks to the apparently narrow, private space in Tapaswi–O-Taragini by Buddhadeb Basu, where one suddenly confronts his own self while trying to know someone else.

I am looking for the face I had
Before the world was made


these lines from Yeats contain the germ of this play and are echoed in the courtesan Tarangini’s question, “ why can’t I see the face masked by my face, the face you had seen ?“

Her query had seemed to us, and still seems, to voice the urgency of the eternal human quest for self knowledge and the meaning of life, a quest that extends the ostensibly limited self into infinity.

The production was revived in 1998.

Photos of the Production

(P)reviews of the Production

Credits –

Lights – Tapas Sen
Music - Debashish Dasgupta ( 1981) / Suman Chattopadhyay ( 1998 )
Set Design – Kanchan Dasgupta ( 1998 )
Stage – Manu Datta
Direction - Salil Bandyopadhyay

Tughluq

Our next production was Tughluq by Girish Karnad in 1979.
Karnad’s play took an exceptional significance for us in the context of the events which dominated the political scenario of the 1970-s – the birth of Bangladesh, the declaration of emergency, Indira Gandhi’s electoral defeat, the subsequent denunciation of her despotic regime, and the formation of the first non-congress government at the centre. Karnad, who wrote the play in the 1960-s, was interested not so much in the historical Tughluq, a man depicted as tan extravagantly eccentric tyrant prior to his re-evaluation by historians, - as in using the Sultan’s story to explore the towering personality of a contemporary statesman – Jawaharlal Nehru. Our production of Tughluq, however, involved a shift in focus, made necessary by the political upheaval of the 1970-s.


Credits –
Lights – Manoranjan Ghosh / Joy Sen
Music - Rathin Dey
Costume – Manu Datta
Stage – Kumar Roy
Translation – Chittaranjan Ghosh and Swapan Majumdar
Direction - Salil Bandyopadhyay

Pratham Partho and Sankranti

Our first production was launched in 1978. It was Pratham Partho and Sankranti – two plays by the renowned author and playwright, Buddhadeb Basu. The political turmoil of the 1970-s, a decade when the government and the opposition strove with equal fervour to establish a reign of terror, reminded us time and again of Mahabharata, of that fratricidal conflict that had laid waste the entire land. Both Pratham Partho and Sankranti are set in that apocalyptic time when even that wisest of man had become embroiled in an unholy war to uphold justice.

While Pratham Partho revolves around the last ditch attempts on the eve of the Kurukshetra war to avoid it, Sankranti depicts the events of the day on which the war finally came to an end with Duryodhana’s ultimate defeat. Our first production can be described as an essay in understanding our own predicament in the light of Basu’s remarkable reworking of the Mahabharata myth.

Credits –
Lights – Manoranjan Ghosh
Music - Partha Sengupta
Stage – Manu Datta
Direction - Salil Bandyopadhyay

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Our Mission

Our passion for theatre stems from our fascination with the tangled web of the relationships that shape our lives and our identities. All our productions have been prompted by a desire to unravel these tangles, to understand our relationships with each other, with our selves, with our milieu, with the world we live in, and with times past, present, and future.