The war cry that failed to ring out, and other peeves of an evening at the theatre

 The more I live in this city, the more it shocks and irritates me. The evening of Saturday, 2^nd March was no exception. What promised to be an evening of superb, if expensive, theatre, turned out to be just another nail in the coffin for my never-present love for the great cultural capital and metropolis.

My mother and I, and the occasional friend, try to catch as many plays as we can around the city –which still has a bunch of them happening regularly – as often as we can. Being long-term fans of the art form, the name Nandikar is almost like a sacrament. The veterans and intellectual giants of the Bengali theatre scene, one expects a lot from them, more so when shelling out a thousand bucks a pop for the privilege of seeing them strut the limelight.

 

When D managed to score tickets for the play which was running to multiple sold-out venues, mom and I were thrilled. This promised some intellectual stimulation, some well-spent hours, some fun, even! And “Panchajanya”! The Mahabharat is one of our favourite epics, and we spend a lot of time talking about it, analyzing characters, deconstructing storylines and themes. Add to that the fact that the play is named after the celestial conch shell of my absolute favourite character ever – Krishna – and expectations were, expectedly, running high.

 

Armed with an e-ticket on my phone and email, and escorting two senior citizens, one of whom is osteoporotic and not very athletic, to say the least, I arrived at the great Kalamandir about an hour before the scheduled start time. Now, this is one of those “high class” intellectual venues, a watering hole for the who’s who of the calcatian glitterati – literary and otherwise – where every visit promises sightings of celebs in the wild, so to speak.

 

While waiting for the hallowed gates to open and let us into the inner sanctum, I overhear a conversation between a senior gentleman seated to my mom’s right, and another passing by who stopped to speak to him. Turns out both were, at some long past point in their lives, professors of chemistry in two elite Kolkata institutions. Starting with “oh quantum was such an in thing in our time, we thought if you knew quantum you knew everything”, the conversation quickly moves to last names and caste. Which one is the Bodyi (vaidya) and which one is the Kayostho (kayasth). Doesn’t surprise me, but it does depress me, that “communist” intellectual Bengalis have caste so high on their list of must know information about new acquaintances. That’s peeve number one for the evening.

 

Lining up begins…. Snaking queues of old and young, athletic and infirm humans all awaiting entry, but wait! What is this!? Another line snaking to the ticket counter? Mom gets all anxious and paranoid – go check it out, see what it is – but I assure her it must be last minute seekers looking to score a ticket or two. Why worry? We have our e-tickets after all. Until “eta kolkata” (this is Kolkata, normal rules don’t apply) strikes again. Someone mentions that e ticket holders much go to the counter to show the QR code and have their booking “validated”. Why this cannot be done by one person with a scanner standing at the gate… well, no one knows. Normal laws of the universe and physics are seldom found to apply in Kolkata.

 

So off I go, phone in hand to validate my few grands, and, after a long enough stint in line, and conversations of how ridiculous this is for a venue like Kalamandir and in comparisons like Mumbai and Pune, I finally get to the window. Turns out me and my phone and my proof of purchase is not enough for them. They need to physically look at every single viewer on my tickets and STAMP them!!! Frantic back-and-forth calls ensue, and senior citizens are forced to hobble up to the counter to get stamped like cattle. That was peeve number two.

 

Then another round of queuing up, stairs that are steeper than Mont Blanc and elevators that crawl slower than snails, and we finally get to our seats. As one may imagine, after all this winning of herculean tasks, the desire for a good theatrical experience is even higher. Having seen other excellent adaptations of the Mahabharat, I am looking forward to what such stalwarts will do.

Stage décor is nice, sparse and tasteful, and the lighting is fluid.

 

The first shock comes in the form of recorded dialogues while the players on stage are “emoting” in silence. Multimedia and fusion notwithstanding, I get plenty of canned content all day, every day, thanks very much. Why would I come to see a play by such big names only to watch a pantomime to some canned dialogue?

 

The second shock is the appearance of the young Krishna. He’s basically a pumped-up Ranbir Kapoor with Salman Khan’s muscles. And so fair! What happened to the Shyamala sundara nawala kishore of the Indian epics? Could they not find a single darker actor who could do the job? And the guy is not even a good actor and has no stage presence to speak of! Then comes the Bollywood. Song after song, dance after dance of the “dahihandi” and raas lila variety, punctuating an interminable love narrative of Krishna and Radha. Where is the consummate diplomat and “kuutnitigya” who perpetuated such a massive war? Where is the warrior? The philosopher? The “sakha” whose heart was so much taken with his Sudama is on stage beating, insulting, bullying, and singling out Sudama for one atrocity after another! This schoolyard bully is not how Krishna can behave!

 

The third shock is that Jarasandha is the main villain, and he constantly berates, curses, demeans and even physically beats up Kansa! The fourth shock is the simple ineptness of the actors, where no one has any voice projection or personality at all… dialogues are delivered a la OTT serials, and hardly audible due to a terrible sound system and overloud music. Jarasandha, Kansa, Krishna, Arjun, none of them seem possessed of any kind of stage presence, and even the character of Parashuram, the scourge of the Kshatriya, the humongous personality everyone fears for his wrath and powers, is nothing more than a mumbling, insipid nobody in this great presentation.

 

By the time the interval rolls around, both me and my mom are disgusted and irritated, and Krishna has not even managed to get out of Vrindavan! Still romancing the now married Radha, and doing kung fu (that’s right, every once in a while he and his cronies break into very Shaolin-like moves for minutes at a time!) when is he planning to get to Mathura? When to plan and implement the plan to free Aryavarta from the tyranny of the Kauravas? When to perpetuate his epic war? No sign of that Krishna has emerged yet. Halfway through and he is still busy tugging at the odhnis of the gopis.

 

Second half begins, another half hour passes, and Krishna is still singing and dancing and romancing, and the only reference to the machinations towards the epic war is through a few gopinis in Dwarka talking about how he is travelling the subcontinent gathering allies, followed immediately by another garba dance. At this point, I am seriously considering stepping out for the rest of the shenanigans to sit in the lobby and read a good book, when we are rescued by two urgent messages from work and home.

 

Needless to say, we left happily, and in a hurry, vowing never to try another play by any big name in Kolkata.