“Can you please take your seats, Seemaji has a back ache and cannot be in this position for long” tells us an usherer addressing this to the attendees of her play.
This is a double act - two single act plays both performed by Seema Biswas for Tagore's centenary celebrations. Both are based on stories by Rabindranath Tagore. The first is directed by her friend and the second one is directed by herself. I have purchased tickets for both plays and just happy that I have got this rare chance to watch one of the finest actresses from India perform on stage live.
I cajole my friend to join me and she reluctantly agrees fully disliking the fact that attending this play means going all the way to the tip of South Mumbai and return home late night, but finally relents. She also warns me not to expect much from the plays as she had read them as a kid.
“Both of these are kind of feminist themes, with very very depressing subjects and very sad endings” But I am still not daterred.
They are taking place in the Tata experimental theatre, one of the stages of the NCPA where you could use a lot more elements of the entire atmosphere here flexibly (like I saw in a musical performance of Romeo & Juliet where Luke Kenny a VJ jumped around the steel girders and supporters on the roof like a monkey).
The attendees are fewer of the usual cosmopolitan attendees (punjabi, parsi, catholics, arts students etc.) and a very very large mix of Bengalis all turned out exquisitely adorned. “We can have a stage a fashion show of Dhaka sarees here” quips my friend who is in smart casuals. The bengali crowd means they also rarely keep quiet even as we take our seats and the bell signals the act is about to begin.
As we enter the theater we can see some smoke coming from a pot which has coals in it and next to it is a funeral pyre ready to be lit, and a body like a mummy wrapped around it. The Pyre has been disheveled and as a result the body is lying inclined feet up, and fully tied to the wooden logs underneath. Thats when we realize its Seema Goswami who is waiting for he act to begin.
We all hurriedly take our seats. The others (chatterboxes & co) take their time to sit inspire of being prodded along and still go on animatedly discussing their neighbors and other daily problems, and unfortunately for us come and sit right in the rows front of us. One of the senior Bengalis sitting in the front row turns around and booms “Silence please. Discussions only during the intermission please” and to make sure the message gets across repeats this in Bengali. Its hard not to laugh when he says this.
The bell rings and the lights are switched off except for the dim lights on stage. Seema Biswas slowly starts speaking in a mix of Bengali, Bihari (Jharkhandi dialect) and slowly starts unwrapping herself from her shroud and discovers she has been given up for dead and her funeral procession abandoned her when it rained. When she goes back home she’s taken up for a ghost and thrown out of her house. This one act play with only her doing a monologue, lullaby mimicry talks about the travails of being a child widow and how she became the servant and ill omen within her household, a third class citizen who everyone shunned. as she aged it got worse, and now that even her family refuses to take her back she asks the question where do ghosts go?
Its hard not to be absorbed, and our attention rarely flags. Seema has all the body language of an aged woman wearing the Bengali dresses that widows wore in the 19th century, pat down (no blouse, but a sari wrapped around and cloaking her head. There are no answers as her act ends and we know the future is bleak, scary and she’s going to be begging for the rest of her life or in some ashram waiting for death.
The break for the next act is barely 15 minutes and this time Seema is in another avatar, directing herself. My friend tells me this is an even more depressing story and asks me to brace myself.
And when you see this act within a span of 20 minutes the transformation is unbelievable. There are small children’s toys - wooden and clay from the previous century on stage. Seema is wearing a pleasant looking saree in the style from West Bengal but all decked up in terms of hairstyle and exquisite make up. She is talking in refined Hindi and is a much more confident woman like from the upper class Zamindar landlords and also well educated.
In this play she’s playing the role of the daughter in law of a big household who intervenes when a young child is to be married off to an elderly husband and the tension and the sad news that follows the wedding. Her husband and the elders advice her not to intervene and tell her she’ll have to face the consequences and may be thrown out if she persists. She is narrating this in her monologue. This time she’s a more confident younger woman and besides the dress its her body language, the tone of her voice, the diction but more importantly how she’s looking at the audience and you know she’s undaunted in her task of protecting the young child even though its not her own daughter.
As the play ends she is talking about how she’s wondering about her future and she’s at the river banks as she stands at the edge of the stage and tells us she has only way and slowly takes a step down on the stairs leading to the stage. And after the first step when we almost gasp she then looks at us (and this is an eerie moment when her eyes connect with us - she is pretty much looking at EVERY audience member in the eye) and says - were you just thinking now that I was committing suicide?
There’s no proud laugh or shrugging off and looking down upon the audience and instead she re-iterates that her fight is not over and she will persist, and is only reaching out to the river to offer a prayer before she goes back.
It was hard not to give her a standing applause for a long time (nearly ten minutes) even though she wanted to speak. She thanked her directors and team members and one of the dignitaries from NCPA also thanked her and talked to the audience about how her training at the NSD enabled her to incorporate so many different facets like kalari payatu, folk style singing and devotional drama recitation and more - all fo them culminating in this magical act.
But this was one of the most remarkable performances and purest ones un-diulted by artifice and un-necessary distractions - the only performance was of Seema BIswas and the focus only being the story. Her body became another player along with her voice, and the narration, and then her face and most importantly unmissable her eyes (especially in the second act) which seemed to imbibe every strength of femininity and the power/ shakti that Female Energy represents and is unnsurpassable and indomitable - and who better than Seema Biswas to represent this.
She did act in other plays but I couldn’t watch them, but my recommendation is that the next time she’s performing at a theatre near you, it will be a command performance, appointment viewing - not to be missed - you might never get a fabulous chance like this again.
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