The more I live in this city, the more it shocks and irritates me. The evening of Saturday, 2nd March was no exception. What promised to be an evening of superb, if expensive, theatre, turned out to be just another nail in the coffin for my never-present love for the great cultural capital and metropolis.
My mother
and I, and the occasional friend, try to catch as many plays as we can around
the city –which still has a bunch of them happening regularly – as often as we
can. Being long-term fans of the art form, the name Nandikar is almost like a
sacrament. The veterans and intellectual giants of the Bengali theatre scene,
one expects a lot from them, more so when shelling out a thousand bucks a pop
for the privilege of seeing them strut the limelight.
When D
managed to score tickets for the play which was running to multiple sold-out venues,
mom and I were thrilled. This promised some intellectual stimulation, some well-spent hours, some fun, even! And “Panchajanya”! The Mahabharat is one of our
favourite epics, and we spend a lot of time talking about it, analyzing characters,
deconstructing storylines and themes. Add to that the fact that the play is
named after the celestial conch shell of my absolute favourite character ever –
Krishna – and expectations were, expectedly, running high.
Armed with
an e-ticket on my phone and email, and escorting two senior citizens, one of
whom is osteoporotic and not very athletic, to say the least, I arrived at the
great Kalamandir about an hour before the scheduled start time. Now, this is
one of those “high class” intellectual venues, a watering hole for the who’s
who of the calcatian glitterati – literary and otherwise – where every visit
promises sightings of celebs in the wild, so to speak.
While waiting
for the hallowed gates to open and let us into the inner sanctum, I overhear a
conversation between a senior gentleman seated to my mom’s right, and another
passing by who stopped to speak to him. Turns out both were, at some long past
point in their lives, professors of chemistry in two elite Kolkata institutions.
Starting with “oh quantum was such an in thing in our time, we thought if you
knew quantum you knew everything”, the conversation quickly moves to last names
and caste. Which one is the Bodyi (vaidya) and which one is the Kayostho
(kayasth). Doesn’t surprise me, but it does depress me, that “communist”
intellectual Bengalis have caste so high on their list of must know information
about new acquaintances. That’s peeve number one for the evening.
Lining up
begins…. Snaking queues of old and young, athletic and infirm humans all awaiting
entry, but wait! What is this!? Another line snaking to the ticket counter? Mom
gets all anxious and paranoid – go check it out, see what it is – but I assure
her it must be last minute seekers looking to score a ticket or two. Why worry?
We have our e-tickets after all. Until “eta kolkata” (this is Kolkata, normal
rules don’t apply) strikes again. Someone mentions that e ticket holders much
go to the counter to show the QR code and have their booking “validated”. Why this
cannot be done by one person with a scanner standing at the gate… well, no one
knows. Normal laws of the universe and physics are seldom found to apply in Kolkata.
So off I
go, phone in hand to validate my few grands, and, after a long enough stint in
line, and conversations of how ridiculous this is for a venue like Kalamandir
and in comparisons like Mumbai and Pune, I finally get to the window. Turns out
me and my phone and my proof of purchase is not enough for them. They need to physically
look at every single viewer on my tickets and STAMP them!!! Frantic back-and-forth calls ensue, and senior citizens are forced to hobble up to the counter
to get stamped like cattle. That was peeve number two.
Then another
round of queuing up, stairs that are steeper than Mont Blanc and elevators that
crawl slower than snails, and we finally get to our seats. As one may imagine, after
all this winning of herculean tasks, the desire for a good theatrical
experience is even higher. Having seen other excellent adaptations of the Mahabharat,
I am looking forward to what such stalwarts will do.
Stage décor
is nice, sparse and tasteful, and the lighting is fluid.
The first
shock comes in the form of recorded dialogues while the players on stage are “emoting”
in silence. Multimedia and fusion notwithstanding, I get plenty of canned
content all day, every day, thanks very much. Why would I come to see a play by
such big names only to watch a pantomime to some canned dialogue?
The second
shock is the appearance of the young Krishna. He’s basically a pumped-up Ranbir
Kapoor with Salman Khan’s muscles. And so fair! What happened to the Shyamala sundara
nawala kishore of the Indian epics? Could they not find a single darker actor
who could do the job? And the guy is not even a good actor and has no stage presence
to speak of! Then comes the Bollywood. Song after song, dance after dance of
the “dahihandi” and raas lila variety, punctuating an interminable love
narrative of Krishna and Radha. Where is the consummate diplomat and “kuutnitigya”
who perpetuated such a massive war? Where is the warrior? The philosopher? The “sakha”
whose heart was so much taken with his Sudama is on stage beating, insulting,
bullying, and singling out Sudama for one atrocity after another! This schoolyard
bully is not how Krishna can behave!
The third
shock is that Jarasandha is the main villain, and he constantly berates,
curses, demeans and even physically beats up Kansa! The fourth shock is the simple
ineptness of the actors, where no one has any voice projection or personality
at all… dialogues are delivered a la OTT serials, and hardly audible due to a
terrible sound system and overloud music. Jarasandha, Kansa, Krishna, Arjun,
none of them seem possessed of any kind of stage presence, and even the
character of Parashuram, the scourge of the Kshatriya, the humongous
personality everyone fears for his wrath and powers, is nothing more than a
mumbling, insipid nobody in this great presentation.
By the
time the interval rolls around, both me and my mom are disgusted and
irritated, and Krishna has not even managed to get out of Vrindavan! Still romancing
the now married Radha, and doing kung fu (that’s right, every once in a while
he and his cronies break into very Shaolin-like moves for minutes at a time!) when
is he planning to get to Mathura? When to plan and implement the plan to free
Aryavarta from the tyranny of the Kauravas? When to perpetuate his epic war? No
sign of that Krishna has emerged yet. Halfway through and he is still busy
tugging at the odhnis of the gopis.
Second half
begins, another half hour passes, and Krishna is still singing and dancing and
romancing, and the only reference to the machinations towards the epic war is
through a few gopinis in Dwarka talking about how he is travelling the
subcontinent gathering allies, followed immediately by another garba dance. At this
point, I am seriously considering stepping out for the rest of the shenanigans to
sit in the lobby and read a good book, when we are rescued by two urgent
messages from work and home.
Needless
to say, we left happily, and in a hurry, vowing never to try another play by any
big name in Kolkata.
