Wisdom Chain

The Bengal stage is no stranger to revolution. Over decades it has lent itself to discovery,to dissent,to emotional dialogues. And leading from the front were stalwarts like Shambhu Mitra,Ajitesh Bandopadhyay and Badal Sircar. Names that have bestowed upon us a legacy,that sadly seems lost on this generation at times. “Bandopadhyay showed us the way for adapting foreign texts in Bangla theatre… he was a revolutionary in creating a local milieu for foreign plays,” says theatre personality Biplab Dasgupta of Theatrum,a cultural forum. But his influence on theatre is something that not the youth today is completely aware of. Reason why Theatrum decided to pay a tribute to the founder of Nandikar. And a handful of groups like Theatrum have taken it upon themselves to initiate today’s youth to the doyens of the Bengal stage.

Bidhannagar based Natya Shodh Sansthan recently organised Badal Utsav,a 5-day-long programme to relive Badal Sircar’s contribution to Indian theatre. “Sircar was one the few theatre personalities who brilliantly captured the changing patterns of human crisis in post-Independence India. A tribute to him in Kolkata was long overdue,given that Pune,Bangalore and Delhi had already organised theatre festivals dedicated to him,” says Madhuchhanda Chatterjee of Natya Shodh. The festival,which opened with the likes of Girish Karnad,Amol Palekar and Shyamanand Jalan expressing what Sircar meant to them as an artiste,had video screenings of his stage productions,play readings,lectures and recreations of Sircar’s plays. ‘The turn out was overwhelming. We wanted to reach out to a young audience and we think we were reasonably successful,” says Pratibha Agarwal,president,Natya Shodh. “Sircar never believed in pointless conformity. Probably reason why the government is not to keen on introducing him to the 21st century youngster. But we thought it was important that this generation knew how he captured the paradoxes of the middle-class youth in the independent,liberalized India through plays like Ebong Indrajit,” says Chatterjee. Sircar has given twenty of his original scripts,several of them unpublished for their archive.

Sujoy Prosad Chatterjee,also the co-founder of Theatrum,has plans to resurrect Shambu Mitra’s transcreation of the classic Oedipus Rex,Raja Oedipus,in public memory. “It’s not just a stunning transcreation of the classic in Bengali,but Mitra’s text is also not available in print. It was an immensely controversial and successful play in Mitra’s times,” says Chatterjee. The play reading will bring the text back for the youth,almost 35 years after it was last staged in Kolkata.

“People like Bandopadhyay had a vision for great theatre in Bengal. We want today’s youth to understand and carry their vision forward. That’s why we are not only working on Bandopadhyay’s work. We want people to understand what he and his contemporaries meant by translation of works of greats like Pirandello,Brecht etc,” says Dasgupta. Explains why Theatrum plans to go to schools and colleges encouraging them to read and stage transcreations.