Thesis plays are not new; most of the plays written by Alexandre Dumas (Jr.), Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw fall into this category. The distinctive feature of a thesis play is that it stridently and conspicuously expresses the ideologies of its maker, generally through long speeches delivered by the protagonist who is the playwright’s mouthpiece. When I first read Bratya Basu’s Banijye Basate Lakkhi (published in a Puja Annual last year), I was surprised by his choice to write what quite closely resembled a thesis play not only because this category of plays has fallen completely out of vogue, but also because one is not sure why someone who penned Oshaleen in 1996 and Ruddhasangeet in 2009 should in 2016/17 come up with a thesis-play-like Banijye Basate Lakkhi. Putting it in the inimitable coinage of mini-bus conductors of Kolkata, this amounts to, speaking in terms of dramatic form and technique, ‘moving ahead backwards’.
নিভা আর্টস এবং সংসৃতি’র যৌথ প্রয়াসে সওদাগরের নৌকা দর্শককে একটি ভরাট ও তৃপ্তিকর অভিজ্ঞতা উপহার দিল : https://t.co/yyXRPSWvKD#film pic.twitter.com/XJf8okgcEx
— kaahon (@kaahonwall) March 12, 2017
The other thing that bothered me with the text was that it seemed to have been contaminated by the deadly virus that has now infected and rendered seriously ill so much of contemporary Bengali films and television serials – the obsession with relationship tangles, spiced with ‘illicit’ sexual escapades.Take the Namrata character. A female working in the corporate world, she uses her sexual charms to achieve her aims. The Namrata episode adds unnecessary flab to the text by introducing an element of sexual titillation, much in the manner vamps are used in cinema.It is not coincidental that in the stage production the set, light and music were designed to convey the look and feel of a television serial.
The play also seemed to be rather conflicted about its pivotal issues – entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship (I will come back to this point later). However, I was still keen to watch the stage production because sometimes what does not seem to be working in print comes wonderfully alive on stage, touched by the magic of live performance. But the debut show of the play that I watched on 5th of March at Mohit Maitra Mancha confirmed my worst fears – this entrepreneurial effort of Indraranga’s Indrajit Chakraborty, at least for me, did not pay any dividends.
It is acting, more than anything else, which makes a play become theatre; unfortunately, the acting could not saveBanijye Basate Lakkhi. Sumit Roy in the role of the mouthpiece-character, Arya Dutta, had to shoulder the maximum responsibility in the department of acting. Throughout, he was struggling to fit into a role that seemed a few sizes too big for him. Was the character written with some other actor in mind? Rwita Dutta Chakraborty was quite convincing in the beginning as Debolina Roy, using her presence and carriage effectively to convey a no-nonsense business woman. But in the scene where learnt that her daughter had eloped with her most trusted employee and lover, she chose to scream and screech, instead of trying to project the many layers and nuances of her anger, anguish, guilt and anxiety. Sanjib Sarkar, Runa Bandyopadhyay and Antara Bandyopadhyay as Sagar Dabriwal, Arya’s mother and Namrata Joshi respectively were reasonably competent in their portrayals of their rather one-dimensional characters. (Questions – If she had to remain a sort of contrapuntal presence to Arya, why did Arya’s mother have to die? What significance did the fact of her death add to the text?) Rayati Basu is an actor with promise; her interpretation of a slightly troubled but self-assured young woman (Jinia Dabriwal)located at the threshold of adulthood was quite riveting. If one came away with the feeling that most of the actors (especially Sumit, Sanjib and Rwita) did not inhabit their characters with enough conviction, the playwright will have to take some responsibility here, for not having roundly created the characters. To give just one example, there was absolutely no foundation built into the character of Arya – an ambitious, corporate go-getter driven by capitalist dreams – to support his abrupt change of heart as a result of having seen some poor people lining up to receive alms in a Tamil Nadu village.
As hinted earlier, the play suffers fundamentally because the playwright did not seem to have thought out with clarity the central ideas about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Bratya Basu’s successful plays bear the stamp of clear-headed, pointed, well-thought out ideas – Banijye Basate Lakkhi does not have him operating in top-form. Beginning with a strong advocacy of the idea of entrepreneurship as an unconstrained corporate growth to generate enormous financial wealth, the play introduces somewhere around the middle the idea of the‘thikthak’(proper? correct?) entrepreneur, and things become muddled. The ‘thikthak’ entrepreneur is charged with the responsibility of trying to erase the poor-rich divide in society. This is notion of a socialist-capitalist is as bizarre as Sukumar Ray’s fantastic ‘hasjaru’; the fact is, in today’s supremely competitive business order operating within an free-market global economy, the ‘thikthak’ entrepreneur – whether we like it or not – is the one who maximizes profit for one’s corporation, even after having earmarked a portion of the revenue generated for CSR. How the wealth generated by vigorous entrepreneurial activity will be taxed in a regulated manner and then distributed in society to reduce inequality (in terms of purchasing power, access to civic amenities and various categories of resources etc.) is the responsibility of the government. Midway into the play Bratya Basu sets out, quite unaccountably, to turn Arya into a ‘good’ boy. He is taken out of the clutches of the amorally sexual, business-minded mother and deposited suddenly, without any attempt to create a structure of emotional logic for it, in the lap of the daughter who has shunned business, entrepreneurship and generally, capital itself. If something can successfully kill a play with a thesis, it is abandoning the thesis somewhere along the way.
Banijye Basate Lakkhi remains a less than satisfactory narrative about a Bengali entrepreneur who does certain things, the rationale of which we do not always understand; it never becomes a text that attempts to analyze the reasons for the pervasive un-entrepreneurial mindset of Bengalis as a race. But this need not be the case always. In 2014, a play was staged in Kolkata by ECTA of New Jersey – directed by Sankar Ghoshal, it had only one actor, Sudipta Bhawmik. The entire 90 minutes of the play was devoted to a focused questioning and analysis of the entrepreneurship-aversion of Bengalis. In his review of the play for The Telegraph, Prof. Ananda Lal had this to say:“Under Sankar Ghoshal’s direction, Bhawmik holds our attention for 90 minutes with virtually no props for support…”; I wish I could have written something similar in my review. The name of the 2014 play? Banijye Basate Lakshmi.
Dipankar Sen
