Soumitra Chatterjee and Bengali Theatre

Few outside West Bengal know that this year''s Dadasaheb Phalke winner, Soumitra Chatterjee is not only an outstanding performing artiste who has portrayed different characters in as many as 14 films by Satyajit Ray, or he has acted in around 300 films over his 53-year-old career in films, but that he has also contributed to the public theatre¹ in West Bengal like few actors have in contemporary times.

Soumitra Chatterjee has directed and acted in more than a dozen plays and according to director-actor Meghnad Bhattacharya, 'is the only public theatre director whose innovative planning for stage productions and his thought-provoking style of presenting different sequences on the stage hardly has any difference with the group theatre director''s mode of working. He has given public theatre, a completely different look from many standpoints. His plays focus on contemporary life mixed with crisis and confrontation.'

Soumitra Chatterjee''s first play was MUKHOSH, the Bengali adaptation of WW Jacob''s horror short story, ''The Monkey''s Paw'', which he directed while doing his Masters at Calcutta University. The play won the first prize at the Inter-University Drama Contest in Delhi in 1956. He met Ahindra Choudhury, a great name on the Bengali stage, who was invited to polish the work of the student actors. Chatterjee requested the great lighting master, the late Tapas Sen to create and orchestrate the lighting for the play.

His next play was BIDEHI adapted from Ibsen''s GHOST. But recognition came with his sterling production of NAAMJIBON with which he established himself firmly on the professional stage of Kolkata. NEELKANTHA, written and directed by him with himself in the title role was first staged in 1988. When revived several years later, it drew a full house every time it was staged. Other successful plays are RAJKUMAR, TIKTIKI (Sleuth), ATMAKATHA (the Bengali adaptation of Mahesh Elkunchwar''s famous Marathi play) and most recently, RAJA LEAR, adapted from Shakespeare''s KING LEAR.

Chatterjee used the word ''tiktiki'' when he adapted Anthony Shaffer''s original English play SLEUTH for the Bengali stage The word ''tiktiki'' in Bengali means lizard. But for some reason or other, it has come to acquire a more sinister meaning. It is used in a rather pejorative manner to identify a ''detective.'' Chatterjee''s adaptation is a complete re-localisation of the ambience, the mood, the characters, and most importantly, the language into Bengali, thereby investing in the play, a specific and unique cultural identity rooted in the Bengali language. It therefore becomes a ''new'' play for the Bengali audience, who are not aware of the Shaffer play or film.

Audiences can also appreciate TIKTIKI as an original Bengali play because at no point does the reference come across except in terms of the characters and the basic theme of the wife''s lover having stepped into this arrogant man''s house to find himself trapped in a game of deceit. Keeping the basic tenets of the Shaffer play, Chatterjee has vested his creation with a totally Bengali essence, drawing generously from rich literary sources in Bengali, English and Sanskrit, including sayings and proverbs carefully chosen to fit into the ambience and the setting of this exciting battle of wits between the two principal characters.
Within three years, TIKTIKI had more than 125 shows, each one performed to a full house. The two actors, Soumitra Chatterjee and Koushik Sen held the audience enthralled with their brilliant performance in this psychological thriller. A little digging into the history of Anthony Shaffer''s original play would be interesting. SLEUTH, when first staged in London, ran for 2,359 productions and for 1,222 on Broadway, winning the Tony Award for best play in 1971. Michael Caine performed the role of Milo Tindell. In the Bengali adaptation, Koushik Sen plays Bimal Nandi. Sir Laurence Olivier did the role of Andrew Wyke, transformed by Soumitra Chatterjee to Satyasindhu Coudhury, a direct descendant of the Sabarna Choudhuri family, the founders of the city of Calcutta.

Talking about his love for theatre, Chatterjee says, 'The deep influence Sisir Bhaduri left on me is unforgettable. I loved to act even as a child. The home environment was not against these things then. My grandfather was the president of an amateur dramatic club and we grew up hearing his anecdotes from that life. My father acted in plays produced by a similar group. And he was brilliant at one other art - the art of reciting poetry. He won prizes at recitation competitions held by the University Institute in Calcutta. As children, we would often put up our own ''plays'' at home, based on small booklets of children''s plays that could be bought from the market. I recall having ''staged'' Tagore''s MUKUT at home, improvising the stage, using bed sheets for curtains, getting help for props and costumes from my parents. The neighbours and elders in the family would form the audience. We got a lot of encouragement from our parents. When I was in Std. V, I did a role in The Sleeping Princess for a school function. I loved the very feeling of acting. I found it fascinating. The praises, the back-patting, kept me going on to do more.'

'Natasamrat Sisir Kumar Bhaduri''s theatre inspired me deeply. As I watched him perform - his way of walking about on stage, creating a character, his unique style, I decided to become an actor. I had seen plays of the IPTA (Indian People''s Theatre Association) before seeing Bhaduri on stage. I also saw Bohuroopi plays. I have not been consciously influenced by any single school so to say, but have imbibed different things from each. I watched Sisir Bhaduri perform in Srirangam''s PRAFULLA the night before Srirangam, his group, was closing down. The year was 1956. My fundamentals in acting are from his plays. I consider him my guru in acting. I had the good fortune to act with him in just one play. I did the role of Suresh in PRAFULLA. His portrayal in and as Chandragupta will remain the best stage performance I have ever seen. He taught me to read Bertolt Brecht. He once told me- ''you have a powerful voice, but you don''t know that you have one - you must know this - you must know where the strength of your voice lies.'' I took his words seriously,' Chatterjee recalls.

In 2008, Soumitra Chatterjee directed and acted in ATMAKATHA. The play, produced jointly by Mukhomukhi and Nibha Arts, ran to a packed Tapan Theatre in south Kolkata from August 24 for several weeks running. ATMAKATHA (1988) is the Bengali translation of Mahesh Elkunchwar''s original Marathi play. Twenty years later, it remains timeless. It takes time to get sucked into the memories of an old man, Subhankar, a famous writer, as Pragya, a much younger girl, draws out from him, truths he is afraid to own up to. Once you are sucked in, you are mesmerised as you watch Pragya, researching his life, peeling off the layers of untruths the man lives within. It is as if she holds a mirror to him to point out the gaps between the autobiography he is writing and the truths he is scared to pen down. The cracks in his Gandhian armour, his betrayal of the two closest women in his life, his wife Uttara and her younger sister Basanti, begin to show up. A sudden telephone call from his estranged wife Uttara becomes a turning point. Pragya points out that his betrayal of the faith they placed in him was not just personal, but political too, because he ''used'' them manipulatively as ''characters'' in his literary works, violating the confidence human relationships are based on.

The real and the literary begin to merge and blend and separate again. Uttara and Basanti literally walk out of the pages of his book, not as themselves, but as the characters he has created to question him about the ethics of such manipulation. In real life, Uttara and Basanti share the common bond of betrayal by the same man. It is a strange love-hate relationship they are trapped in, through memories of their love for Subhankar, the writer. In the present time, Pragya is emotionally drawn to this man, thrice her age, and the now mellowed Subhankar watches on helplessly. The sense of animosity towards Subhankar makes way for deep empathy for a man, whose fame, power and popularity, have not been able to chip away his loneliness.

Who else could have performed Subhankar but Soumitra Chatterjee? He does not need either costume or make-up to slip under the character. That puzzled frown on his face when Pragya accuses him of the lies he has lived through, a hand rubbing his forehead to crease out his worry, his restive pacing up and down the proscenium space, his body language, leave little to the imagination of how a famous writer is forced to face some of the most bitter truths of his life. The single set is vertically split to define the two areas of Subhankar''s flat and Uttara''s home. The massive book with its hidden door in the open pages stands in the centre, unifying the two worlds literally and symbolically to illustrate the illusion of writing and the reality of life.

'Acting in theatre is acting in real time. It is continuous, sequential, chronological. The rehearsals for a play take care of the actor''s preparation for his role. The response too, is immediate. Cinema however, is not acting in real time. It is discontinuous, not sequential and not chronological either. There are no rehearsals for cinema. So, it is very important that the actor prepares for his role through discussions with the director, by reading and re-reading the draft of the script,' explains Chatterjee.

In 2011, he wrote, directed and acted in Prachya''s TRITIYO ONKO OTOEB (THE THIRD ACT, THEREFORE), an autobiographical production. The play maps the personal, social, political and historical journey his life has undergone. Chatterjee, suffering from cancer, presented his autobiography as a live stage performance. The events that finally shaped him as an actor are mapped too - the arrival of soldiers of Netaji''s Azad Hind Fauj at Barasat - packed like animals in a train, the Bengal Famine, the Great Calcutta Killing and finally, his encounter with Natasamrat Sisir Kumar Bhaduri. His professional life is marginalised to the man Soumitra Chatterjee who smoked 20 cigarettes a day for 50 years till one day his body painfully reminded him that he had stretched himself a bit too far. The play was staged at the Academy of Fine Arts on January 20 to coincide with Chatterjee''s 77th birthday. The proscenium lends itself to an autobiographical presentation in a way that the written word in a book cannot.

Soumitra Chatterjee who sometimes includes the audience in his interaction, occupies centre-stage, turning the revolving chair into a wheelchair that he rolls down the stage in the latter half with an imaginary ''I'' seated on it. This part deals with the illnesses he slipped into in September 2007. His swift emotional vacillations indicate the evolution of the subject from childhood to adolescence through youth to adulthood mapping the personal, social, political and historical journey his life took, placing him in perspective.

As a director, Chatterjee explores through TRITIYO ANKA OTOEB the live performance environment where performer and audience are co-present and share the same time and space, creating an ideal location for the autobiographical medium through theatrical performance. As an actor, he shares his character with two other actors who are present on stage at the same time. The subject of the autobiographical production gains from instant feedback. References to Beethoven as an inspiration to go on living, to Jeebanando Das whose poetry inspired the title of the play, and closes on Chatterjee''s recital of Tagore''s Prothom Diner Surjo on the banks of the river Roopnarayan. It ends with that beautiful song of endless hope that urges the traveller walking through the night not to stop, and marks a touching ending to a beautiful play. TRITIYO ANKA OTOEB is a staged autobiography that shares joys and sorrows with the audience. It is not a self-centred, manipulated monologue directed at the gathered audience. It is rather about the Self that Soumitra Chatterjee inhabits in the larger world from which he draws his imagination.

Notes

1. The public theatre in Kolkata refers to ticketed performances. The plays maybe of the commercial variety but there are experimental theatre productions too. ''Private'' theatre generally implies invited performances where tickets are not sold, but those are few and far between because they depend entirely on sponsorship.

*Shoma A. Chatterji is a freelance journalist, film scholar and author based in Kolkata. She holds a Ph.D. in History (Indian Cinema) and is currently a post-doc senior fellow of the ICSSR, Delhi. She has authored 17 published books of which seven are on cinema, six are on gender, one is on urban anthropology and three are collections of short fiction. She has won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema twice and the Laadly-UNFPA Award for consistent writing on gender issues in 2010 among other awards. She has been on the jury of several film festivals abroad.