Theater review: Playhouse, an adaptation from Friedrich Dürrenmatt

I watched Playhouse yesterday. Produced by the group Shailushik. At the Rabindrasadan auditorium.

Playhouse is a dark comedy or a problem play of five principal characters around the theme of justice. More precisely the justice seldom delivered in a courthouse of law. But that which is brought forth by a guilt ridden conscience upon itself after the layers of a carefully orchestrated pretence are peeled off one by one. To reveal a face scarred with the ugliness of sins gone overlooked by the world at large.

Indrajit Dutta's sparkling new red BMW breaks down on a rainy night in the outskirts of North Bengal. He seeks refuge in a house of a retired judge, Pinaki Samanta, which doesn't have a functional telephone. Indrajit plays the metaphorical double of both the epical hubristic Meghnad and the mythological Ares. As he also reminds me of the tragic hero Macbeth.

Ironically, he is the zonal manager of a firm that makes hephaeston, a binding polymer that is as strong and unbreakable as steel. Interestingly, the product name is a derivative of Hephaestus, the Greek god of smithy (think Vishwakarma minus the charm) who married Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. Legend holds that Aphrodite was disgusted with the ugly lame husband and started an illicit romance with the handsome Ares. Coming to know about this affair from Helios, Hephaestus wraps his wife with a net of steel and takes her to Mount Olympus for justice.

The imagery of a noose or a steely mesh drawing close on criminals, who are off limits for regular legal proceedings, pervades the play from the beginning. The ominous undertone doesn't take too long to settle you in an expectation of an imminent doom. Only it is never overtly pronounced.

The stage quickly fills with three friends of the old judge - a jailor cum hangman, a public prosecutor and a defence advocate - a boisterous crowd of retired men of law, who seem to belong to a self imposed agency of bringing culprits to a deserving deliverence. Apparently however, they engage in frivolous evenings of single malts, listening to Chopin, singing Cohen and feasting on crab sizzlers finishing off with custard. All this while play acting scenes of make believe legal trials for merriment. They invite Indrajit to play and he agrees in good humor to enact the role of a convict, accused of corruption leading to murder of his erstwhile boss, Bijan Samaddar.

As the evening proceeds, effects of intoxication and a semblance of real life arbitration lead Indrajit to reveal his past, thanks to a persistent interrogation by the prosecutor. He is goaded into confessing the mindcrimes he had committed to climb up the corporate ladder. For an ambitious transition from driving an Alto to a BMW. While the defence counsel and prosecutor match their wits to concoct contrasting illustrations of Indrajit as a helpless pawn of hard times versus a cold blooded killer, the judge declares him both guilty and innocent but sentences him to death nonetheless. But then Indrajit is also given a choice. What is it?

Won't give away the plot, nor the ending but the play kept me hooked. Superlative histrionics from Padmanabha Dasgupta, Arjun Dasgupta and Sridip Chattopadhyay were totally worth every moment of attention. The music was also commendable, striking an intended balance between a contrived jollity and a jarring angst.

Indrajit's character, whose boundless ambition becomes his undoing, has undertones of the overachieving Macbeth. Remember how in Shakespeare's play, Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft orders three witches to congregate at a forbidding place where Macbeth will seek their help? In the fourth act the witches or as some read them, the Three Fates, gather as Hecate ordered and produce a series of ominous visions for Macbeth that herald his downfall. Play house has echoes of the witches in the jailor, the prosecutor and the defence lawyer - all progressively conjuring up a series of visions for Indrajit. Pinaki, the judge is Hecate's shadow without any sensationalized voodooism attached to the version.

I will not refer to Friedrich Dürrenmatt's story which inspired this play. Nor will I go to draw parallels with Edgar Wallace's Four Just Men. Simply because Playhouse goes the extra miles to make the stage a topical reference to the present day India. Director Kamaleshwar Mukherjee and script writer Padmanabha have both created a production that rings familiar with the contemporary audience. Allusions to chit fund, fascism, Nirav Modi on one hand and the aspiration-less communist middle class on the other, clarifies where the moral compass of the play points to. Dürrenmatt's distinctly left wing ideologies influence the treatment albeit shortly.

Do watch Playhouse. Please do.
Picture courtesy: Sridip Chattopadhyay's wall