Director Anjan Bose tells Utpal K Banerjee that his play Vasansi Jirnani, based on the Argentine-Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, deals with the endless cycle of hatred and punishment
Sansaptak has been performing original theatre in Hindi and Bengali under the playwright-director Torit Mitra with distinction over 20 years. They have now handed over the baton to their youth brigade and the recent Vasansi Jirnani (not to be confused with Mahesh Elkunchwar’s eponymous play) is the outcome.
Vasansi Jirnani is based on the Argentine-Chilean playwright and social activist Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, written in 1990 and first performed at london’s Royal Court Theatre in 1991. In the play, Paulina Salas is a former political prisoner in an unnamed latin American country — modelled on Chile — who had been raped by her captors, led by a sadistic doctor whose face she never saw. The rapist doctor played Schubert’s composition, Death and the Maiden, during the act of rape; hence the play’s title. Years later, after the repressive regime — also unnamed, but akin to General Pinochet’s — has fallen, Paulina lives in an isolated country-house with her husband, Gerardo Escobar. When Gerardo was once driving home, he gets a flat tire. A stranger named Dr Roberto Miranda stops by and drives him home. Paulina recognises Miranda’s voice and mannerism as that of her rapist, and takes him captive in order to put him on trial and extract a confession from him. The entire confession is recorded and Paulina has Roberto write it out and sign it. She sends Gerardo out to get Roberto’s car and while they are alone for the last time, Paulina charges Roberto of being unrepentant and guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It is uncertain whether details are evidence of Roberto’s guilt or Paulina’s paranoia. At the play’s end, it is unclear who is innocent…
Dorfman had noted, “We inhabit a time of fear and mistrust. Nothing could be more urgent than asking ourselves how we should react when we have been overwhelmed by a monstrous offence. Nothing could be more imperative than the need to understand how easy it is to go from victim to accuser, from accuser to invader, from violator to victim”. Incidentally, the 1994 film, by Roman Polansky, starred Ben Kingsley as the duplicitous doctor, as did the redoubtable KK in the Indian film-adaptation dating from Mizoram’s torture-memories. On stage, there is a memorable Bengali version, with Gautam Halder as the doctor and a Hindi one, Shalini Vatsa, by Asmita Theatre in 2002. In Sansaptak’s Indianisation, directed by Anjan Bose, the soul’s-transience shloka from Bhagavad Gita: Vasansi jirnanii yatha vihaya… is made the theme-chant and the time-setting is made ensuing the Emergency in India in 1975. There are repeated allusions to the leftist ‘comrades’ who, however, played insignificant role post-Emergency. The accused doctor needs better sense of timing, but the man-and-wife duo does quite well, especially the grievously-wronged wife (Sreemoyee Dasgupta). The stage-set is imaginatively done and music adequate. It is abundantly clear how a strong theme can shine: even in the hands of a relatively young and enthusiastic team.
Says Bose, who also enacts the husband, “I was inspired by both Ben Kingsley and the Neha Dhupia film Siskiyan. In showing the ending as the husband and the doctor enjoying a drink together, my main idea was to show that you can’t kill these people; there will always be another place and another time when they will rise”. On motivation, “I sought to show the woman’s immense pain and depression vis-à-vis the prevailing political consciousness”. On some elements of comic, “I introduced this feature — not to be seen in Indian or Western adaptations — to mitigate the tension arising from high adrenal rush!”
To quote Dorfman again, “The man and woman I dreamt up embark on the quest for guidance and deliverance that Paulina Salas formulates. Stripped of all defences, they go at each other with all the hope they can muster. They wonder, as I do, if we will be able to find a way out of the endless cycle of hatred and retribution in which our species seems to be trapped”.