Produced by Tritiyo Sutra, Agunmukho in Bangla, a play which ran at Kolkata's Max Mueller Bhavan to a packed theatre in 2007, is a free-flowing adaptation of contemporary German playwright Marius von Mayenburg's Feuergesicht. It is a turning point for Mayenburg who began his career with Haarmann in 1996. Written in 1997, when Mayenburg was just 25, and first performed in Munich at the theatre Kammerspiele in 1998, it has been performed almost all across the world, including the Royal Court Theatre in London. Mayenburg was awarded the Kleistforderpreis fur junge Dramatikerand the Preis der Frankfurter Autorenstiftung for Feuergeisicht. A joint production of Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata and Tritiyo Sutro, Agunmukho has been relocated within a Bengali ambience against the upcoming Salt Lake in Kolkata.

Agunmukho features an urban, contemporary family that could belong anywhere in the world. Despite its nuclear state, comprised of a middle-aged married couple and their two growing children, Googly and Kutush, the family appears to be disintegrating for no reason at all. The decay is as much in terms of relationships and adjustments as it is in terms of its claustrophobic nature and its moral values that take a complete turnabout within the children. The parents choose to avoid recognizing signs of rebellion and pay a heavy price for their failure to bear parental responsibility.

If one probes deeper, the seeds of disintegration lie within the framework of the family itself. The parents have been married before to other partners. So, while Googly, the girl, is the husband's daughter from his previous marriage, Kutush, the son, is the wife's offspring. Yet, the bonding between them is so close that it evolves into incest. The parents remain oblivious. The husband hides himself behind the daily newspaper fascinated by headlines of blood, crime and gore. The wife vacillates meaninglessly, between and among her passion for television, her apparent overprotective approach towards her son, and household chores that are reflexive and escapist at the same time.

The family chooses to keep Kutush trapped in his teenage frame of "13 or 14" as a way of explaining his irrational behaviour and his bursts of rage. In reality though, Kutush may have crossed adolescence and again, he may have not. His age is more a metaphor than chronological fact. While Googly, obsessed with FM, discovers an outlet for her frustrations in free sex with her brother and a boyfriend, Kutush is more devious and violent - he has slowly built up a cache of violence in one small niche within the flat. He collects every indigenous ingredient that goes into the recipe for making crude bombs. It is this pyromania - the obsessive desire to burn down anything and everything - that forms the content, the essence and the message of the play.

If the boyfriend seems to be the sanest person around, young director Suman Mukhopadhyay has a different take. "The boyfriend is 'sane' by our normal codes of sanity that is the result of our subjective internalizing of sanity and insanity. He 'appears' to be sane because it is convenient for everyone to consider that he is sane," says the young director. He extends this logic further by adding, "The question of 'ethics' is part of the agenda of a nation state to maintain 'order' in society. 'Violence' is a contextual term. State allows the 'violence' of the police and the military to sustain 'civil' society. However, if any subject, provoked by the violence inflicted on him/her, voices a protest, it is considered 'criminal' and 'anti-social'. The language of the parents is hegemonistic too. In fact, incest here is a way to negotiate with growing frustrations. Googly and Kutush may not be biological brother and sister, true. But they are expected to uphold the roles of 'brother' and 'sister' as codified by social norms. For Kutush and Googly, the sexual interaction is an act of defiance. The play sustains the raw sense of the arrogance that defines adolescence. It recognizes the disturbing reality within the teenage psyche that existence itself is a humiliation. While researching the play, I happened to get into a search engine and typed 'explosives.' You cannot imagine the number of websites I found listed in the category. If this is not a pointer to reality, I do not know what is."

Agunmukho is the most frightening play this writer has seen in recent times. The violence is more in its content than in its form. It forms the undercurrent of the events that lead up to its radically tragic climax which finds Kutush hacking his parents to death, Googly riding away with the boyfriend and Kutush exploding everything around him, including himself. The claustrophobic ambience is brought across brilliantly by S. Bose's set design and Sujit Sanyal's lighting, often throwing up multi-layered shades of red suggesting fire, blood, rebellion, passion, even the sky at daybreak. The flat is cramped within the 20'x20' of stage space, generating a sense of confinement of emotional space for the characters and the alienation that results from it. "I wished to depict the universality of urban space," says the set designer. "There is hardly any culturally specific living space in the urban world today as all apartment blocks look just the same everywhere. The play actually challenges all notions of "Bengali" urban space. It represents the character of a city that rises above any given ethnic culture," he sums up.

The music, a collage of four hit songs from four mainstream Bollywood hits - Rang de Basanti, Don, Dhoom2 and Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna- is totally and absolutely post-modern, suggesting the loss of history, the eternal present, and a fusion of modes of cultural and artistic expression. The acting by the five characters is natural and spontaneous. The boyfriend's bike is a metaphor for speed, migration, displacement and shifting relationships. Bratya Basu, who did a free and open adaptation, insists that he resisted any kind of literal translation. "Translation has only been in terms of the language which again, had to be changed within the dialogue to fit into the changed culture, geography and social processes. The play had to fit into the contemporaneity of the urban malaise, be it Germany or Kolkata," says Bratya.


A brief note on Tritiyo Sutra

Sumon Mukhopadhyay, a trained theatre personality of Kolkata, founded Tritiyo Sutra (The Third Law) a few years back. It performed Tagore's Phalguni at the Prithvi Theatre Festival in 2006. It also staged Tagore's Rakta Karabi at the Tagore Festival in Kolkata in August 2006. Mukherjee recontextualised Raktakarabi in a contemporary setting without making it a modern costume play. It broke way completely from the form and vision of theatre that was practically written in stone by the likes of Shambhu Mitra and his contemporaries.

The company believes in a multidisciplinary company and brings together actors, writers, set designers, technicians, singers, puppeteers, computer graphic designers, video artists, film producers, contortionists and musicians.

*Shoma A. Chatterji has been writing on cinema and gender for nearly three decades. She also writes on television, theatre, fine arts, human rights and does celeb profiles. She has authored 16 published books and has won two national awards, one state award, one institutional award, two research fellowships and has just submitted her Ph.D. thesis on cinema. She is 64 and is based in Kolkata. This feature was first published in Screen in July 2007. It has been reproduced here with minor editions.