Play: Malyaban
Original Novel: Jibanananda Das
Dramatization: Shubhashish Gangopadhyay
Directed By: Kaushik Sen
Theatre Group: Swapnashandhani
Cast: Kaushik Sen, Reshmi Sen & others
Light: Ashok Pramanik
Sound: Swapan Banerjee
Costume: Reshmi Sen
Mr. Kaushik Sen told me in a short little post-performance dialogue that he was
attracted predominantly by an image of poetic waste in Malyaban. The dramatization
of Jibanananda Das’s novel (posthumously published in 1972) indeed foregrounds a
pitiable image of poetry wasted by the hostility of circumstantial time. It is more
or less a textually faithful production. Like Das’s novel, Malyaban, the play
directed by Kaushik Sen, revolves around the character of Malyban (Kaushik Sen), a
middle-aged clerk in a British company in colonial Bengal with the freedom-movement
in full swing. He lives with his wife Utpala (Reshmi Sen) & daughter Monu in a
shabby two-storied house. The play tells the story of this unhappily happy family &
the curious love-hate relationship between Malyaban & Utpala, who are poles apart in
every way. Malyaban’s fussy, talkative & extremely domineering wife starkly
contrasts his poetically introspective temper. Communication beyond domestic
triviality has ceased to exist between them. Sexuality is also a faint memory.
Malyaban is isolated in a claustrophobic ground-floor room while Utpala & Monu sleep
upstairs. That is his sulking nook where he revisits his rural childhood, a pure
world of nature, which has disappeared in his current Calcutta-haven. Much of the
play’s conflict lies in Malyaban’s dreams in his past & their depleted condition in
his present. His revolutionary fervour, unrealized like so many other ambitions of
his, has brought in frustration & a lack in his self-belief. He is trapped in a
no-man’s land between his liberative political dreams & his ironic placement,
serving the British colonizers to earn bread for his family. Does Malyaban’s failed
life hold the key to his sterility & his submissiveness to his wife? Is it an
inverted Jimmy Porter scenario, then? The more Jimmy failed, the angrier he became.
The more Malyban fails, the more subserviently silent he becomes. But, that silence
is poetic, as both Malyaban & Kaushik Sen will tell you.
The play does not have a great deal of action. It moves back & forth in time to
incorporate fragments of memory. The plot proceeds in concerns with death,
loneliness & erotic jealousy. A new-born child dies in the neighbourhood. So does
another neighbour’s wife. Malyban kills a little cat & dreams his as well as
Utpala’s death. He has to leave the house to stay at a mess as Utpala’s elder
brother comes to live at their place with his whole family. Men start finding entry
into Utpala’s room as Malyaban finds it hard to compete with the new-age
Calcutta & all its macho youthfulness as represented by Amaresh, Utpala’s
new friend. Utpala, on the other hand, seems to tease Malyban’s dimming
masculinity through this game of sexual jealousy. The play ends with the opening
lines of the novel to emphasize the element of monotone & stasis in an infinitely
repeatable circularity of Malyaban & Utpala’s lives. This, however, is Kaushik
Sen’s directorial interpretation. It was not there in the novel. Neither was it a
part of Shubhashish Gangopadhyay’s script. The innovation fits in, more or less,
with the spirit of the novel as well as its performance, underpinning the
repetitiveness of lived existence.
Malyaban was always going to be a difficult novel to dramatize because of its
plotlessness & a heavily loaded poetic language. But, full credit should be given to
Shubhashish Gangopadhyay. The idea of using five narrators, often as the chorus,
sometimes as marginal & referential characters & occasionally as an alternative for
stage props (they even play hooks in a scene), works out wonderfully on stage. They
perform the inner-drama of Malyaban’s mind, forming an other to his self. On stage,
these ‘bhands’ (as they are called) also open up the passage, which connects
Malyaban’s existential malady with the greater malady of his times. They are all the
more important, because in their abstract, fluid & almost spectral register on
stage, they can dramatically naturalize some of the most verbosely philosophic
passages of the novel. The script-writer’s credit is that he brings into the play,
the lilting poetry of Jibanananda’s spiral-language, which might go on to establish
a new dramatic idiom in Bangla Theatre.The performances were competent. Both
Kaushik & Reshmi did justice to their roles. But, one feels that Kaushik Sen’s
acting was a little too realistic at times. He was too identified with his character
to create a distance from Malyaban’s self on stage. Malyaban’s self-confession of
solipsism demanded that distance. And he certainly could have under-acted more.
Reshmi as Utpala was subtler in her expressions, conveying her agonizing love for
Malyaban in moments of helplessness, trying to love her husband & then not being
able to. The other side of the irritating, fastidious & unimaginative Utpala did not
go unnoticed in her performance. All that should suffice to avert a feminist upsurge
against the play. The dynamism of the five narrators, however, was the real
show-stealer. They coordinated the whole performance, appearing from & disappearing
into the light & shade of the stage like humming worms of the night. They sang;they
danced; they recited & finally they conquered.
The stage-space was handled quite brilliantly. Upstage center, on an elevated
platform was Utpala’s room. Malyaban’s was downstage right, outside the curtain,
carrying the suggestion of not only a separation from Utpala’s room but also an
alienation from the primary performance-space, as it were. Malyaban & Utpala’s
dialogue thus became a virtual dialogue between the core-stage & its extension. The
‘bhands’ cropped up from the corners, the left wing downstage & even from underneath
the platform of Utpala’s room. The offstage was also sibilant with the guests in
Malyaban’s house, the kitchen & all pivotal sounds from the neighbourhood (the cry
for the dead child, the funeral hymn etc), packed in it. All these splits in the
stage-space became a mirror of the fragmented existence in performance. Almost
throughout the play, there was alternate lighting on the two rooms, signifying a
mutual exclusiveness of the two worlds of Utpala & Malyaban. Spotlights were used to
trace the clown-like narrators. The lighting was successful in creating a
chiaroscuro on stage. There was minimal colour in lighting. The use of stage props
was minimal too. There was no lavish scenography. The sound effects were well
thought out. The chirping & the hooting of the birds, the cry of the cat--all
created an eerie nocturnal atmosphere, which was required for setting the mood of
Malyaban. The play-script was nicely punctuated with Baul songs like ‘loke bole’ &
Jibanananda’s poems like ‘Shuranjana ’. All music & recitation added on to the
drama. The play was set in a tragi-comic key by director Kaushik Sen. Utpala’s
shouts & grudges pitted against the meekness of Malyaban drew laughs from the
auditorium while their sense of living as wasting in trifles, was also underscored.
Certain performative moves & dramatic moments deserve a mention. The expository
scene, where Malyaban’s tussle with his past aspirations of becoming a lawyer is
projected in terms of a choreographed ‘Kabadi’ routine where he is defeated in a
game against the five narrators who then throw down books on the fallen Malyaban, is
poignant. The scene where Malyaban sees the sky studded with stars as the narrators
hold little lamps in an otherwise dark stage or a rare moment of sexual intimacy
between Malyaban & Utpala in darkness, or the scene where Malyaban tries to be manly
with Amaresh’s bicycle as an object of erotic envy, are all well executed. All these
moments turned the stage into a poetic image. But, at the same time, all these were
images of movement & action. One felt that Mr. Sen was worried about holding on to
inaction on stage. He concretized all reflection in terms of acts. Even the memory
of Malyaban & Utpala’s imprisonment was made tangible with two of the narrators
holding bar-frames in front of them as they spoke about that past-
episode. The trajectory of performance could have been less strident. There could
have been less of physical exertion. The play required more passivity & a greater
shade of abstraction, perhaps. But, doing that was risky. Kaushik Sen’s attempt was
extremely good but it lacked the final frontier of daring. Jibanananda Das’s
Malyaban hardly wanted to be novelistic in a given sense of the term. It was almost
autonomous of its genre. In trying to be dramatic, in another given sense, Malyaban,
the play, partially lost the element of artlessness, essential to the spirit of the
original in an otherwise faithful production.
In the tiny exchange with me after the performance, Mr. Sen did imply that he
wanted Malyaban to be a play of indirect action like Chekhov’s The Three
Sisters or The Cherry Orchard. But, the question remained--did he achieve the
Chekhovian indirectness? Yes, but only in parts, like the terminal scene where
Malyaban & Utpala froze in an intensely united posture of physicality, the lights
went off on stage & their voice-over whispered to complete the last words of the
novel ---
“-- Konodin phurube na shit, rat, amader ghum?
(Shall it never come to an end, the winter, the night, our sleep?)
--Na, na, phurube na.
(No, no, it will never come to an end.)”
The mumbles stopped. But, nothing ended. It all went back to the beginning as the
first words were re-uttered by one of the narrators. The curtain came down.
Malyaban’s room, his bed, quilt & table, all remained outside the curtain, as if
never performed. The image died in stasis. However a lingering impression of void
was everywhere.
