Restaurateur Sanchayita Bhattacharjee impressed everybody with her acting chops. She tells Karan Bhardwaj about new-age challenges for women and how her kitchen skills help her understand the audience better
Can there be any similarity between kitchen and theatreIJ Ask Kolkata-based Sanchayita Bhattacharjee. She has been a stellar performer in both arenas. A chef by profession, Bhattacharjee has been acting on stage for over 25 years. “Cooking is very much like acting. Just like the dish is different each time you prepare it, so is your act on stage. Both involve spontaneity. If I cooked a good meal yesterday, it would certainly not help me today. Kitchen is like a live theatre,” she said as we met her during the rehearsals of her recent show, A Woman Alone, at NSD. She was here to take part in DIAF.
While Bhattacharjee took to serious cooking over a decade back, her admiration for acting dates back to college days. “I was very passionate about acting. So I used to take part in college theatre activities. Cooking came naturally but the fondness grew gradually. So I went to london’s le Cordon Bleu to pursue culinary skills. After working there for two years, I came back and opened my food joint called The Restaurant on the First Floor,” she said. While she continued to impress lovers of French cuisine, she also pursued theatre. “My cooking has helped me to be alive for each performance. Cooking is dynamic as you have to make a lot of adjustments. Your tomatoes may be smaller, brinjals could be longer or fish may not be that good. So I have to adjust the menu as it is coming each day. Similarly, I have to adapt myself according to the audience. The same play has a different tempo at different places,” she said.
A gold medallist in International Relations, she has been a staunch believer of women rights. That perhaps is the reason why she is so excited about this play. Originally written by Italian playwrights Dario Fo and Franca Rame in 1968, A Woman Alone is about a housewife locked indoors by her husband who must deal with a crying baby while fighting off the advances of his crippled wheelchair-bound pornographic film-obsessed brother, a man with a telescope, an obscene telephone caller and a former teacher who has fallen in love with her. “The protagonist has a conversation with her neighbour where she unravels her life. Ultimately, it becomes too much for her and she makes a choice. There’s a lot of black humour involved. Although there’s pain and anger in her life, she manages to smile and keep moving,” she told us.
The 55-minute show highlighted the multiple roles a woman has to play and how courageously she braves all the challenges that come along.
“Her life is being pulled in every direction. She is a mother, woman, sister-in-law, consumer and neighbour. She is trying to do her best in every role and puts up a happy face to show to the world, until everything is disclosed,” she said.