Solo on Stage

Biswas — who shot to fame after playing Phoolan Devi in Shekhar Kapur’s 1994 film Bandit Queen and was appreciated for her role as the deaf-mute Flavy Braganza,the mother of Manisha Koirala in Khamoshi (1996) — is both anxious and excited about her show at NCPA’s Timeless Tagore festival on Saturday. This isn’t because at 8 pm,she will perform the monologue that’s close to her heart,this is more to do with her 5 pm show on the same day when she will recite Tagore’s Jeevit Ya Mrit,directed by Anuradha Kapoor of the National School of Drama. “I’m not as worried about remembering my lines as I am about being exhausted,” she confesses.

Both plays deal with women-centric issues that,according to Biswas,are as relevant today as they were in the previous century when they were written. Jeevit Ya Mrit is a paradoxical story of a widow who has to prove she’s alive by jumping into a well because her family and friends think she’s dead. Streer Patra,on the other hand,is a letter written by a married woman to her husband about how he has the right to be angry with her while she doesn’t have the right to show kindness to a lonely widow.

“The beauty of Tagore is that he has in his time created such complex and deeply nuanced female characters,” says Kapoor,adding,“I don’t know how the audience in Mumbai will receive these plays but we’ve taken them across the country and they have been received quite warmly. With these you see that Tagore’s stories aren’t just driven by language but by the complexity and people’s ability to identify with them.”