The first Saturday in December and Madhusudan Mancha in South Kolkata was running packed house. A theatre show of any magnitude drawing such a big audience is rare by any standards. Given the fact that a week before when the ticket distribution started, people thronged the counter almost five hours before. And, within a couple of hours of opening the counter, the shows were full! Blame it on one person – Soumitra Chatterjee. Raja Lear - the production of Minerva Repertory – the first in Bengal with Repertory’s own full-time actors and few guest actors like Soumitra was stopped for almost 6 months since its first show in November 2010.
Soumitra Chatterjee had been successful in theatre – a huge box-office crowd-puller given his star image, but at the same time had been intriguing in his theatre productions – something he sadly cannot exercise much in cinema these days. William Shakespeare’s King Lear is one of Chatterjee’s dream roles and he had been vocal about his wish to play the king. In Catherine Berge’s compassionate documentary on Soumitra named Gaach there were snippets of the play that the legendary thespian acted along with Rabi Ghosh playing the Fool. That had however increased our thirst to watch Chatterjee play Lear in a full-fledged play. It is great to experience the play hence, considering the wait we have borne with as audience.
The play directed by Suman Mukhopadhyay (who like Soumitra is carelessly confident and flows freely between theatre and films but as a director) is setup with a grand design, interesting use of architectural levels and light projections. The background score is dramatic befitting the epic saga. Acting is very important in this type of play that relies a lot on lengthy dialogues and in being predominantly verbose to carry forward the narrative. Unfortunately, the standard of acting is not consistently carried forward through the breadth of the play – as a result the viewing experience is laden with discomfiture in parts.
The main attraction of the play is however Soumitra. The majority of the audience in mid forties and above did gather in large numbers to savour Chatterjee’s one of finest performance. And it may be one of his last as well. The element of nostalgic remembrances towards Bengal’s foremost international acting talent, arguably the greatest thespian who donned Bengal theatre and acted with same finesse on screen as well. There are other greats in the long tradition of Bengal’s performing art culture but none is as creatively successful in both the platforms as Chatterjee. He is on stage for more than two hours in a play close to three hours. The physical acting is stupendous. There is the violent impetus, the blind swagger against any voice that is not relenting, the royal impatience – King Lear is embodied in flesh and soul. The original play and this adaptation as well successfully vacillate between the ebb and tide of emotions, embedded with typical Machiavellian villains, of deceit and misconceptions. So sways the mood of Lear – from a king of England to pauper at heart – he earns pity from the audience for being confronted in haste by his cold-blooded elder daughters. His longing for being loved and for being cradled by his daughters make the Fool jibe at him - "he has made his daughters his mothers”. The father’s innate love and fervor makes Lear endearingly human – and not just a royal crown. Soumitra’s pathos, the anxiety, the wounded father is as much the king as any Bengali father. In deft touches he plays to the heart, connecting to the soul which gets wounded seeing at the battered father.
In a review of Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear (refer here: http://www.newquestindia.com/Archive/173-174/Html/The%20Last%20Lear.html), I maintained that Amitabh Bachchan had failed to understand the melancholic drops of Lear, he only managed to shout at full thunder, just that. Soumitra, lived Lear on stage, fumbling, childish and at times lamenting for not having stripped his royal overcoat earlier. In a way, Soumitra ropes in the audience with him, Lear leaves the mortal structure – reverberates in the auditorium and then resides in the soul of every audience. When he murmurs to his youngest daughter Cordelia “won’t you stay back just a while more, dear” Soumitra takes our breath away for the tragedy of life, for Lear and his haplessly dead three daughters but more for the absurd nothingness of our mundane lives.
The ‘dance of death’ seemed plucked straight out of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal but that created a brilliant theatric moment. Notwithstanding Soumitra’s health conditions there should be an effort to digitize the production for posterity – if the Bengali stage and the Bengali audience care to shed off their latent disinterestedness at the slightest pretext, that is.
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