D is c o r d o n F o ur L e g s :

Play: Chairs (English) Director: Asijit Datta

a th eatr e r eview

Producton: The Hypokrites Cast: Arnab Basu, Dipanwita Chaterjee, Anindya Sain Duration: 70 minutes Venue: Gyaanmanch Date: Sept 16, 2012

Woven around the themes of alienation, absence, confusion and reflection, The Hypocrites production Chairs, inspired by Eugene Ionescos Les Chaises, took the French playwrights postapocalyptic portrayal of old-age related existential & absurdist alchemy of life in a modern world, and replaced it with a typical postmodern crisis of subjective anarchy. Also the old couple of Ionesco was substituted with a young couple, trapped in a mundane married life and wishing to knit a world of disjointed fantasy, of Bojor played brilliantly by Arnab Basu, whose energetic elegance in physical movements combining fluidity and jaggedness, vigor of vocal throw and expressions of energy clearly overshadowed that of Fjder played by Dipanwita Chatterjee, who, in spite of her visibly inferior presence upon the stage, mesmerized the audience through her facial expressions of subtlety and deeply mutated emotions. But this youthful vigor of presentation and overtness in symbology of props somewhat failed to satisfactorily replace the original plays violent philosophical refinement, that, through multi-dimensional inter-character

& intra-character dynamics of dialogues and action, provided a better showcasing of discord which lacked in The Hypocrites simple inter-character interaction-based absurdism. Many prop-based and other symbols of the original play, like the doors, the invisible guests, etc were either reduced in the frequency & amplitude of portrayal or left out altogether; building upon mainly on the chairs, whereas Ionesco questioned the so-called order through orderly and meaningless arrangement of the chairs on-stage, here, this questioning was more direct in their visibly disordered placement which, perhaps as a flaw, prohibited the audience from clearly viewing some of the actions in the play. Also, whereas the physical collisions between the couple in Ionesco was intentional and a clear part of the play's message, Arnab and Dipanwita instead bumped in once or twice and restricted each others movements quite clearly a few times which wasnt surely their intention as the spatiotemporal placement of those bump-ins went against the play's flow. In spite of the superb dialogue delivery Arnab fumbled once, but he himself manipulated it to fit within the plays motif of meaninglessness unlike that in the case of Dipanwita, whose occasional cracking of voicing during shouting, stuck out like sore thumbs. Accentuating this was the less-than-standard acoustics of Gyaanmanch. Ionesco's absurdism wasnt merely to portray the alienation of 'meaning' but to show the innate antithesis in the socio-lingual & behavioral alchemy of it that resisted all human attempts to structuralize and quantify; here the linguistics-based absurdism of the original play was sidelined through director-writer Asijit Dattas excellently crafted dialogues that, being a postmodern interpretation, focused more on the basis of pragmatics, which was clearly portrayed when Bojor engaged into a fun-filled one-sided verbose interaction with the audience one of the four occasions where the fourth wall was broken (unlike in Les Chaises), like at the plays start when the couple, from a dark stage, probed the audience with two flash-lights. Some of other such

spectacular scenes in the play were when a cockroach was burned, when the action was caught in a temporal loop with insistent throwing-in of crucifixes from the wings and Fjders subsequent repetitive Amen!-s, and especially when the couple rushed into the audience and started searching for empty chairs. But perhaps the most striking was when, to portray humanitys voyage from Christs sacrifice to succeeding wars, Bojor uttered the Lords Prayer as ...give us this day our daily bread [...] and forgive us our trespasses, as we dont forgive those who trespass against us... and while a sideartist traversed a silent stage twice as Jesus Christ, once with the cross and then with His cross broken, the production reached a preliminary climax. Though here, why Christ was wearing a gamchha was pretty unclear and confusing as, other than adding a Bengali-touch in absentia, it served no symbolic purpose for the play whatsoever. Other than that the costumes were more or less alright the couples black-white dresses highlighting the dystopian angle evidently though the cassock of the orator, played as a deaf-mute priest majestically by Anindya Sain, was a sham. Enhancing the quasi-surreal mood of the stage, the sound designing was far more than satisfactory with nostalgic western classical and semi-classical choir and orchestra-based fragments, with intermittent sounds of breaking of glass, coins jingling, etc. What required more attention was the poor and unimaginative quality of stage-lighting. In spite of the surface vigor and power of the production, it nonetheless succeeded in completely capturing the entirety of the audiences attention, The Hypokrites kinetic display of raw stagetalents missed out on two most important elements of Ionesco the double suicide and the invisible crowd's human noises that makes the original vision more powerful, deeper and surreally violent. The participation of the audience being splendid throughout, too much spatiotemporal compression of the production from the original, too much vigor in physical and

vocal acting, deleted much of Ionesco's intricacies, but still lent a brightly dark youthful dimension to the production that, though could have been perhaps much better with more vigorous rehearsals, better stage settings and closer reading of the original text, succeeded in enacting a 70 minutes-long displacement from accepted reality through few black chairs and an ever-cryptic message that ended the play.

Shubhankar Das PG II, Roll No 10 Modern Theatre Jadavpur University Department of English_2012