NSD Repertory recently staged Khilona Nagar, a fable based on a town’s ordeals. Director Suman Mukhopadhyay tells Utpal K Banerjee how he flowed the narrative without any storyline
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains, I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways, I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests, I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans, I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard…
Bob Dylan set his famous song in a ‘dystopia’. Opposed to utopia, it is an imagined place characterised by dehumanisation, totalitarian regimentation and environmental disaster. Dylan also professed for his dystopia the bleak vision of a precarious future.
Khilona Nagar, presented recently by the NSD Repertory, is — as imagined by Dylan — a phantasmagoria: with a shifting series of real and surreal figures, as though seen in a dream. Under the baton of the Kolkata-based thespian, Suman Mukhopadhyay, the play recreates a fable about a small town — that could be located anywhere, anytime, in a futuristic sense — and juggles, in time and space, the growths, survivals, struggles, disasters and inhuman sufferings of its wretched inhabitants.
When the curtain rises, a disfigured corpse is lifted up to vanish in air, presumably as part of an unseen scientific experiment, observed by horrified, masked spectators. What follows, in no particular order, is a series of metaphors threading through the narrative. Anxiety and despair in the form of two non-descript vagrants trying to stick posters up some walls; revolution-mongering by familiar, slogan-shouting youth waiving red flags; iron-fisted authority in the shape of suited-booted officials. False hope posed by a smart impostor, “divining” water and surreptitiously poisoning it in the process; lust and lechery in the band of a quintet of prostitutes “selling” themselves; abysmal poverty of a cripple skating around; and innocent love blooming between a motor-mechanic and his deaf-and-dumb girlfriend — somewhat resembling the defiant Ranjan and his flower-bedecked ladylove Nandini from Tagore’s equally ominous play Red Oleanders about the gold-diggers.
Indeed, there is the same reference to a livelihood-generating factory (like Tagore’s underground mine); look out for the hidden gold; and the deadly image of the lurking Big Boss (like Tagore’s Yaksha-King). Towering them all is the metaphor of impending death: in the vision of an over-hanging, blazing-eyed vulture that probably spells everybody’s doom.
The mise en scene is full of bric-a-brac — the backdrop of tin canisters marking the closed-down factory that defies all attempts at reopening; the aluminum ramps and the cycle wheels defining the mechanical mode of survival; the cyclorama blocks that add to, or deflect from each other, to create changing scenarios. The ubiquitous pile of dolls that pervade the existence of the near-dead city as well as mark the puppet-like existence of its denizens, especially the marginalised women.
Extracts from a long-distance interview with the director:
The play does not seem to have a connected story…
Yes but there is a flow of narrative, but no storyline. Only the metaphors, like the vulture, hold the narrative together.
Did the original novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya have a clear-cut themeIJ
There was no coherent plot. But the spirit was the same as we have followed, namely, the all-pervading apparitions and nightmares over the city.
Did the play have a western influenceIJ
I don’t think so. It’s an original play, more like documentation. It may appear disjointed, in the sense that there is no beginning, middle or end. But it’s in the nature of a fable, where certain allegories are carried through.
Did you allow improvisation by the dramatis personaeIJ
Yes, we carried out imagery exercise over a considerable period. The actors, in fact, evolved their own imagery.
There’s a terrible bomb at the end that annihilates everything, without the people suspecting anything…
It’s the hydrogen bomb, that’s let loose so suddenly that the citizens can’t even see their own shadows. It’s part of an experiment to observe how technology figures.
What’s your play’s relevanceIJ
Today we’ve reached a moment where everything — be it our memory, history, justice, commitment, thought or even our fragile bodies — look vulnerable and perishable. A constant sense of anxiety, panic and fatigue consumes us. The profanity of our indifferent existence is making us incessantly guilty and remorseful. Nevertheless, we’ve mastered the technique of hiding this guilt, turning our faces away and pretending not to see. As a result, human contempt and hatred are displayed without any self-reproach.