Thealight kicked off its 23rd birthday celebrations by commemorating Rakesh Ghosh, a playwright who has collaborated with the group before for Chua Chandan. Fortunately, the lofty speeches during the award ceremony did not overshadow the performance, as they sometimes do.

A dramatisation of a Saikat Mukhopadhyay story, Mayapori, at its most basic, signifies the victory of inherent goodness over evil. The goodness in this plot is represented by a group of poris, or angels, chief among them being the innocent child, Mayapori (Alankrita Sarkar). A group of dainis, or witches, led by the Daini Rani (Sampa Das Sarkar), wants to exterminate her entire race, and to that end use the dark arts to send storms to blow them off-course. Mayapori, unable to handle the turbulence, is forced to land on an island populated by a group of tin’er putul, or tin dolls, which also wants to take advantage of her for its selfish interests. How Mayapori escapes the clutches of the witch-queen and eventually converts the tin dolls into human beings with beating hearts is what the play is centred around.

A moment from Mayapori

The movements and voice modulation of the actors playing the tin dolls, especially Samson Mathur Chakraborty — he is also responsible for the engaging music arrangement — seamlessly change from staccato bursts of dialogue and gestures to free-flowing speech, appropriately depicting the transition of mechanical robots with rusting joints to lithe humans with compassionate hearts. No praise is too high for Sampa Das Sarkar: her eerie, menacing vocalisation, combined with the darker colours that illuminate the stage during her scenes, gives you goosebumps. Alankrita Sarkar’s performance is pleasing and not needlessly melodramatic.

Atanu Sarkar, the director, does well to shepherd the action along at a canter, keeping the tension taut until the end, where the deus ex machina of a child angel becoming potent enough to overpower the witch-queen brings the plot to an abrupt, but desirable, resolution.