YES,THEY CAN

With one play,Tin Can,a young theatre group in Kolkata,smashed all the rules of the game. Looking back at their journey and at the people who have joined the citys English theatre movement

With one play,Tin Can,a young theatre group in Kolkata,smashed all the rules of the game. Looking back at their journey and at the people who have joined the citys English theatre movement
Even a few years ago,English plays in Kolkata meant visibly uncomfortable men in scruffy suits mouthing Neil Simon lines with affected accents. Cane sofas passed off as sets and chipped china as props. But the 2006 play,Intro,wasnt about white Americans. It didnt have men in ill-fitting suits either. Instead it served up a slice of Kolkata through a montage of the sights and sounds of a busy city street. Using fantastical tableau-like situations,Intro talked about the realities of a city which is pitilessly cruel,filled with sympathy,nauseating and funny,all at the same time. Its characters werent alienating foreigners. Instead,Intro looked at the city through the eyes of its fringe dwellersthe rag pickers,beggars and incredulous characters such as Dirt Kings,who rule the garbage dumps of the city.

Its a play and a style that three years on,continues to draw youngsterstheatre enthusiasts as well as the audienceinto a movement. A reworked version of their first play will travel to the Exchange,a prestigious Edinburgh theatre festival,in July,bringing Tin Cans journey full circle. But more importantly,Tin Can has inspired other theatre groups to break through the conventions of English theatre in Kolkata. Even as students partaking in various theatre festivals,we would squirm at the sheer lack of imagination when it came to English plays in the city. And we werent the only one. We were fresh out of school and wanted to be heard. Tanaji Dasgupta,who was my classmate in school,shared my vision and we decided to collaborate and our theatre group,Tin Can,was born, says Soumyak Kanti De Biswas,the director of the play. As a student growing up in Kolkata,Kanti saw himself as the quintessential misfit. We are all misfits,arent we? There is so much to take in and so little to make sense of. We needed to assimilate all this, says Kanti,who was in the first year of college when he scripted the play.

Enacted by a bunch of school and college students,the play made good use of teenage angst. It was almost as if the actors were liberated from all inhibitions and were asked to let go onstage. It quivered with raw,unbridled energy and made lavish use of technology and innovative stagecraft,particularly back projection and lights.
I was bowled over by the concept. It had no obvious plot,it was actually a collection of scenes,but it made more sense than many other plays I had seen in the city before. It was an hour-long play but it seemed much longer and I mean it in a good way, says Anubrata Basu,who was a 16-year-old school student when the play was staged. Though the play ended up questioning the conventions of the English theatre scene in the city,it was,claim its makers,something waiting to happen.

It was with their third production,Video,staged about a year ago,that the group saw the crystallisation of their vision. By then,other members had joined and they were more exposed to world theatre through workshops in Mumbai. Using video projections,innovative lighting and an unconventional narrative structure,this original play written by Kanti told the story of a group of youngsters in the city but soon lurched into vaguely sinister meditation on the new technologies that encircle and ensnare us. Video also used extensive martial arts-inspired dance sequences,choreographed by the team members. When we made Video,we were sure that we wanted to work with music,dance,theatre,film,design exhibition and photography. We wanted to address topical issues but do so experimentally, says Kanti.

Both Kanti and Tanaji are young adults now,negotiating more adult issues. They will also return to a theatre world which has been coloured by their vision. Soon after Video was staged,other theatre groups of the city followed suit. A wispy musical on Jack the Ripper was staged recently by a bunch of youngsters,which used the same aggressive language that is typical of Tin Can. But the most significant inheritor of Tin Cans sensibility is probably Playhouse,a youth theatre group which was set up by Basu,now a 19-year-old,and Safdar Rehman 18,both of whom have worked extensively with Tin Can. Their first play,Boomerang,staged last year,was a collage of societal conditioning which used child sexual abuse as a metaphor. Through the lives of its two antagonists,a sexually abused school girl and a peon who dreams big,Boomerang attempted to question the very prejudices that plague our society. Both these youngsters,like most Tin Can characters,were misfits in their worlds,both had scores to settle. I remember seeing Intro and falling in love with it. I went to Tanaji and Kanti and told them that I wanted to work with them and they were more than willing to take me in, says Rehman. Playhouse,claims Basu,is a performance group. Using their contacts,Basu and Rehman brought together a creative team of 30-odd school students to put together their first production,which was to be a searing comment on modern society and the way it alienates its younger members.

The fact that these youngsters are scripting their own plays is of vital importance,feels Rimi B. Chatterjee,author and English professor at Jadavpur University,Kolkata. Tin Can reintroduced the trend of scripting original plays in the city. English theatre in Kolkata needed this infusion of fresh thoughts, she says.
We wanted to use populist imagery and situations to drive the point through. The play was a conflux of ideas, says Basu. Like in Tin Can,democracy is the essence of the set-up here too. Everyone has a say. We brainstorm together. In fact,we urge all our members to come up with ideas. No matter how tentative they seem, says Rehman. Which is why the group doesnt limit itself to a specific genre.

We are open to different media. It may be cinema,theatre or even art, says Rehman. Their next project is most likely a performance exhibition which will involve installation art.
The latest addition to the list is Exit,staged earlier this month,which was put together by 25 students from various schools of the city,and protested institutionalisation and the myth making function it entails. It was about two 18-year-olds who wanted to break barriers. Who were fed up of being conditioned, says Rehman,the director of the play.
Members of Tin Can are ready to break new barriers. They have launched a film career with the recently released Bengali film,Madly Bangali.

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At Exchange,the festival to be held in Edinburgh in July,they will perform Intro again. We decided to go back to Intro because the play has the capacity to metamorphose into something new. It is set in a set in a Kolkata bylane,seen through the eyes of a muppet in a gallery. Its about street urchins and garbage girls and we have tried to recreate a typical Kolkata scene, says Kanti. The play will be staged in the city before it travels to Scotland,and Tin Can members are excited about it. When we first staged the play,Kolkata wasnt used to our kind of theatre. Today things are different. The English theatre scene in the city has changed a lot,the way the audiences react to play will be different, he says.