The second and third-year students of the National School of Drama showed their paces over the past week in two very different productions. The third and final year, which one has dismissed as totally inefficient after watching them in Shakespeare’s Macbeth presented last year, turned up with a good performance in a more difficult play, Chekhov’s classic work The Cherry Orchard, thus reiterating the fact that a good director can make even a door post perform. Robin Das has a special aptitude with his young students. I remember Anjalika Kapur even when she was in the last stages of the cancer which cruelly cut off a life full of promise at the age of 26 years, speaking excitedly of working with Robin Das. She was a lovely presence on stage and obviously loved by her classmates and teachers: The Cherry Orchard is dedicated to Anjalika.
Anton Chekhov’s (1860-1904) plays, besides being important as written in the realistic tradition, are vital documents in the history of Russia. The Cherry Orchard, which was Chekhov’s last play, and The Three Sisters, which he wrote in 1901, definitely presage the coming change and the advent of socialism which transformed into the Communist revolution of 1917. Those were times of confusion as the old order was giving way to the new as Trofimov the student says, “Humanity is perpetually advancing, always seeking to perfect its own powers. One day, all the things that are beyond our grasp at present are going to fall within our reach, only to achieve this we all have got to work with all our might, to help the people who are seeking truth.” What was the reality in those times? The landed gentry, like Madame Ranyevskaia, was going bankrupt and having to sell pieces of land, if not the entire property. And liberated serfs, like Lopakhin, who knew the land and were out to change the landscape with their newly acquired entrepreneurial skills. But the poor were miserably poor.
How does that reality compare with our times? We too are living in times of upheaval. People are still suffering form poverty, unemployment and are oppressed by the power of money. Yet we are, by and large, not in feudal chains and are struggling to find our feet in a consumer society where everything is measured in terms of our possessions. What we have is poverty at one end and the very rich at the other. The trickle down effect has not affected the poor and the middle class which is slowly emerging has yet to find a strong voice.
The design by Robin Das is an excellent example of creation of a functional set. A careful sliding of windows reveal the full splendour cherry orchard represented with evocative glass paintings by Rajesh and Rekha Bahal. A further sliding of the entire structure for the second act, we are at a shrine near Mme Ranyevskaia’s emasculated brother Gayev’s estate. Here, Yepihodov, the estate clerk, serenades Vanya, who is besotted by the young servant Yasha, who, looking for greener pastures, rebuffs Vanya. Vanya is the adopted daughter of Mme. Ranyevskaia wants her to marry Lopakhin. In the climatic third act, Ranyevskaia gets news that Lopakhin has bought the estate. As the Jewish band plays for the dancing couples invited to the last party, the backdrop is a black wall and at a higher level downstage is the drawing room, where the agitated lady of the house is playing out her fears. The forth and last act is the same as the first, a drawing room with windows overlooking the cherry orchard.
The sounds of wood being cut is heard as the entourage, with Yasha in tow, preparing to leave. The end of the play leaves one with mingled emotions. Where we see the need for drastic change, we hope that these loveable characters — Trofimov and Anya, Madame — do not suffer.
Ranyevskaia’s daughter gets married and joins the revolution: That Lopakhin stops worrying about money and weds Vanya.
We also hope that Madame Ranyevskaia’s lover remains faithful to her and both, along with Gayev, remember Trofimov’s words about working hard to help people who seek the truth.
This happens because the actors worked hard to get the play across as it was written and meant to be played. No individual actor stood out as not sufficiently there nor did anyone shine in brilliance. The performance rang true to Chekhov because of the director’s brilliant assemblage of the actors as a single unit.
The second-year students’ production Maun Ek Masoom Sa, a reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, was prepared during a traditional folk workshop with the NSD alumnus, currently associate professor acting with her alma mater, Tripurari Sharma, who has penned several plays like Bahu, Birsa Munda, Aks Paheli etc., besides directing plays for several institutions. Othello was first presented as an ongoing project at the Asian Pacific Bureau (APB) Drama Schools meet as part of the extended programme of the 13th Bharangam held at the NSD in January this year.
The production, in the nautanki style, is more polished, some scenes added and production values enhanced. Emila’s character is more fleshed out to include the sequence after the murder wherein she recites paeans to Desdemona’s innocence. When Othello questions Desdemona after the handkerchief is lost, she plays with him. By bringing in the prostitute Bianca here, Tripurari enhances Othello’s stand. Played well by Bharti earlier, and equally well done by Kalyani Mulay, Bianca enters the scene and completes Desdemona’s sentences in the manner Othello looks upon his wife, as a whore. Emilia sings the story of Desdemona in the village square as the poorvarang and continues it in the end as the bharatvakyam. Despite all this the play does not become the “silence of Desdemona”: it still belongs to Othello and Iago.
In an intense and sustained portrayal, Debashish Mondal brings to life the crazed jealousy and suspicion of a wife’s infidelity, never proved or verified by Desdemona herself, leading him to kill his beloved. The throttling of Desdemona, played by Prakriti Dutta so powerfully in the earlier version, was lost in too many small movements, making this scene somewhat clumsy. The starkness of death was missing even though Desdemona, played by Bharti, was more pleasant and her singing as competent. The most unforgettable scene in the play is the poisoning of Othello’s mind by Iago aka Raju Roy. The gradual arousal to jealous rage through a wrestling match, where the lines, “And then laid his leg Over my thigh and sighed and kissed” and then “Cursed fate that gave thee to the moor!,” come naturally as Raju Roy brilliantly spins his web of lies about Cassio and Desdemona. Next, the fight with thick poles reaches a climax as Othello gives in, convinced of his wife’s betrayal.
Tripurari’s design was excellent with some lovely choreography by Malti Shyam. Except for Mrigendra Narayan Konwar, who sang brilliantly as Barbantio Desdemona’s father, there wasn’t a single singer actor who could do justice to veteran nautanki artist Krishna Kumari’s great compositions, which is indeed a pity because the music of song and the nagara (kettle drum) are special to nautanki.