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Drama review

Antaryatra

A tale of the internal and external conflict of a female artiste

ERSHAD KAMOL
NTARYATRA is one of the remarkable productions of Rangakarmee, one of the leading theatres in Kolkata. The group staged this production recently as a part of the festival at the Public Library auditorium arranged by Nagarik Natyangan Ensemble. The play is a solo performance by usha Ganguli.
In the play the playwright, usha Ganguli, has narrated her own feelings and reactions as a performer giving it a universal effect. She has established herself as one of India's major directors leading the theatre group Rangakarmee. Her artistic growth as an actress has been rooted in a concern to react and respond to all those forces that inhibit the fulfillment of humanity.
The characters she has played over the years have been through her experiences of living other lives and learning the modes of survival and the struggles in different situations. She narrates the history of Indian women covering middle class families (in Gudiya Ghar from A Doll's House of Henrik Ibsen, and Parichay from Arnold Wesker's Roots), the urban working women (in Request Concert), the working class fighter (in the Gorky-Brecht Mother), the rural women at the extreme margins (in Lok Katha and Rudaali). Besides, dramatic moments in history in the nineteenth century Bengal (in Gharey Bairey), Fascist Germany (in Brecht's The Jewish Wife) and the seventeenth century thirty years' war in Germany (in Himmat Mai from Brecht's classic Mother Courage and Her Children) have also found expression in usha's performance.
The different dramatic modes in evidence ranging from the naturalistic to the epic only go to highlight the roles their women protagonists assume. Resistance and rebellion, critical understanding and assertion register different responses to deprivation, discrimination and injustice, with usha Ganguli's sense of history and warmth of concern never betraying her into facile realism or sentimentality. Beyond the voices of these protagonists, the struggle for survival in these adversities also comes to the forefront through real life protagonists the village woman Kamala (whose inlaws try to kill her because she has 3 daughters), the city girl Madhuri (whose in-laws force her to commit suicide) and the indispensable house-maid Anima (whose husband drives her out so that he can remarry). All her women emerge as critics of life rising to higher state of realization as they grow within their plays and lives.
usha Ganguli as a director has handled the narrative technique with such perfection that the audience can visualize all the actions listening to her soliloquy.
Her solo performance with excellent body movement, perfect voice modulation and expression left the audience spell bound. Bangladeshi audience will remember this art for a long time.
Khaled Chaudhury designed a simple yet apt symbolic set. He has used a square shaped blue frame to indicate the illusive life of an artist. The yellow circle symbolically refers to a world of cruelty and treachery and a red triangle depicts reaction and revolution.
Tapas Sen, the 'magician' of light direction, showed his mastery over artistic designing.