One of the good things that has
happened to me after coming to Jadavpur University is getting exposed to
professional theatre.Being a girl from Durgapur(where one would rather find a
huge shopping mall than a good book store or a library),I had never seen
theatre as a performing art let alone admire it.In JU campus,which is always
vibrant with different sorts of activities like street plays,film
screenings,seminars and theatres ,students have a good exposure to arts that
they have a liking for.My first experience of theatre goes back to last
September when one of my friends took me to Triguna Sen auditorium in the
campus where Nabarun Banerjee’s(noted author,editor) ‘Fyatarur kissa’,(a
play about an anarchic underclass fond of sabotage and which can fly whenever
it utters the mantra fyat fyat sh(n)aai sh(n)aai) was being
staged .Though parts of the production did not make much sense to me and
the use of expletives in almost every dialogue failed to hold my attention
throughout the play,the technicalities such as lighting,direction,use of props
and dialogue-delivery gave me something new to think about.For the first time I
knew what a theatrical performance looks like.
Jadavpur
University offers a very interesting course structure in English Honours and in
my second semester nothing delighted me more than to study a fashionable
compulsory course named Literature and the other Arts-a comparative and
analytical study of literature in relation to theatre,film,graphic novel and
popular music.Our professor ,Dr.Ananda Lal,who is himself a theatre artist and
director briefed us about the very basic aspects of theatre and discussed the scenario
of Indian theatre in the 21st century.The JUDE annual production was
coming up and Dr.Lal decided to test us on it,that is on what we understand of
the play.This year our seniors put up Mollier’s ‘Imaginary Invalid’,a
satire on hypochondria.We had a week
long discussion on the production,its narrative,technicalities and loopholes
before taking a test on the same.Theatre as an art was beginning to interest me
all the more.
One of my batchmates had started a theatre group with his
schoolmate two years back and this February he got some more of our students to
act in a play called ‘I Love you’.Though not very good as a story I went
to watch the play firstly because two of the actors are close friends and
secondly because I wanted to find out how their group( named ‘Mirrors’)works,so
that I can join them in their next production.The play mostly satirised the way
young people conceive of ‘love’nowadays-some flirt in the virtual media but are
often confused about what they actually feel,some feel ‘love’ to be merely a
luxury of the higher classes when thousands of poor people go without
food,while some others have a vague understanding of the emotion but lack the
company of like-minded people. Loosely
strung but ‘I Love you’ assured me that I would like to be a part of Mirrors’s
next production.
I spent another day at the Academy of Fine Arts where three
noted theatre directors were staging their plays based on the theme rashtrer
kono mukh nei (the state has no face)-Suman Mukhopadhaya’s ‘Mephisto’,Biplob Mukhopadhaya’s ‘Caligula’
and Koushik Sen’s ‘Korkotkrantir Desh’ .’Mephisto’ is the story of a
dancer,theatre artist who loses his friends,his morals and finally himself in a
bid to survive in Nazi Germany(working on the old myth of Mephistofeles who
would rather make a deal with the devil than accept servitude).Everthing about
the play was simply splendid.Right from satire against the state to acting to
props to the overall execution,’Mephisto’ saw the audience satnd up and applaud
at curtain call.’Caligula’ staged the tyranny of a Roman emperor named the same.The death of
his sister/lover convinced Caligula about the absurdity of existence and made
him live by drawing nourishment from hatred;he slaughtered his countrymen,his God-fearing ministers and
even the people who loved him,only to be murdered by a coup.This play had
greater impact on me because of its execution-the lighting,the choreographed
snippets of dance and the way it ended-Caligula declaring his immortality in
death.The last play was really slow and since it was already quite late I left
early.My batchmates who sat through the whole show later told me that the play
tried to reconstruct the ‘Hindutwa terror’ in the Mughal reign but the
narrative as well as the performance failed to impress most of them.
On behalf of IROM-a gender-forum of our campus,I
participated in a play called ‘Bagdhara’ in a Women’s Day program organised by the
Department of Women’s Studies –my first stage perforamance in a play.I really
wished my parents and Sir could be there
on my first performance but it was a busy week and I knew they couldn’t come to
see me performing.I am yet to learn many things about proper theatre and plan
to watch more number of plays in the coming days.As for now,I am thinking of
participating in a street-play for our university fest and also join Mirrors in
its next production that would probably start after our end-semester
examination(it is supposed to a deconstruction of Tagore’s Shyama, which makes my prospect of
working on it doubly welcome!).I have also talked to my parents and Sir and all of them have encouraged me to go
ahead with it.It is always good to learn a new art and if one finds it
interesting ,it is all the more pleasurable.I earnestly hope it works for me in
the same way!
