Richly laden with passionately-sensitive expressions of human emotions centred around love, illness, death and, most tellingly, a steadfast commitment to art, Prachya’s newest venture, Balzaker Premikara (directed by Biplab Bandyopadhyay), is a satisfying watch. It brings to theatrical life the movingly-lyrical take of the veteran playwright, Chandan Sen, on the deeply-disturbed emotional life of Honoré de Balzac. As the title suggests, Sen’s drama traces the trajectory of the 19th-century French writer’s love life and, in doing so, foregrounds Balzac’s intense mother fixation, comprised of loathing and lure in equal measure.
Balzaker Premikara has a powerful impact primarily because Bandyopadhyay has been successful in translating the emotional load of the written text into a theatrical idiom, with a striking scenography designed in collaboration with the art director, Hiran Mitra. A massive length of blood-red cloth arches over the playing area, clashing against the greys, blacks and other dull hues on stage and becoming an extremely evocative metaphor for the explosion of passion within the frame of mundane life. Both Bandyopadhyay’s and Mitra’s fascination with the visual dynamics of the colours, red and black, remains well-documented in their earlier works and their joining hands for this project turns out to be exceptionally fruitful. The light design by Niladri Bhattacharya is nuanced and bold at the same time, allowing the hues onstage to do their own job on the one hand and underlining, on the other hand, the shades of shifting moods.
Buddhadev Das turns in a soulful portrayal of Balzac, paying attention to minute details of the characterisation as evinced in dropping a book on the floor with a plop of frustration or swirling a chair to indicate the continuance of uncertainty or twitching his fingers to suggest impatience. The other performers deserve praise as well, but space constraints prevent proper appraisal of their efforts. The final sequence with Balzac in a crib and back with his mother is as brilliant an expression of the desire to return to the womb as one can expect to encounter on stage.
