Calcutta Club staged the Bengali play "Roilo Nako Keo" at G.D.Birla Sabhaghar last Saturday (April 17, 2010). Based on Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None", the play promised a mix of mystery and suspense that we all have come to like so much. But then there wasn’t much of that, in spite of a nice production on the whole.
If imitation is the best form of flattery, Dame Christie must be feeling absolutely spoilt somewhere up there. The road that ‘Gumnaam’ (remember the Manoj Kumar – Nanda starrer from the 60’s?) chose to follow, has been diligently shunned by director Debkumar Bose. But not out of fear of what it might have been if he had decided otherwise. Rather, out of a deep veneration for the Christie canon. After all, why tinker with a perfect story just for the sake of being innovative?
So, there we were. A close adaptation of the Christie masterpiece, faithful as it could get, avoiding unnecessary inventions or dubious efforts at beating the famed storyteller at her game. Of course there were some changes made to the plot, especially the end and the murders themselves, but those never smacked of enough originality to perturb loyal Christie fans (such as me).
That said, why were there so many in the audience whom I found twitching in their seats as the play went on, especially when bodies had started to fall with alarming regularity about an hour into the play, right after the intermission? I guess I know why.
What could have been a perfect production was largely marred by a creeping sense of tediousness, mainly owing to being slightly overlong. Alfred Hitchcock once said, "The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." It’s no different for a play. Obviously, the director of "Roilo Nako Keo" has little sympathy for such renal concerns.
Another aberration that struck me was the use of props (some too grotesque by most decent histrionic standards), such as a severed hand or a full-blown replica of a murdered character, dangling precariously from a stairway landing in full sight. These are things that, if one were to consider them so terribly important to be brought into the play after all, could easily have resided off-stage and referred to through deft pretenses of terror by the actors. After all, there's more horror in the unseen. Believe me, the audience can think up of more terrifying images in their minds (think of Hitchcock, once again) than one can actually show them (think of Tulsi Ramsay).
The play, in spite of all this, was not a bad one. Its intentions were sincere. Sure enough, a good deal of creative thought had gone into it. The set had pleasing aesthetics, the constant back projection of the river and the sky above it, though dangerously bordering on boredom at times, never really intruded on the experience.
There was, however, little logic in bumping off Arya Gupta, playing an epicurean film director, even before the play had reached its middle and with him, all the fun and chuckles. The play had no Mehmood (like in Gumnaam). And when you don’t have such a steady source of comic relief, it’s a folly to kill off the character who was compensating for it (by whatever extent) so early in the play, and leave the audience gasping for some change of mood. In a story so fraught with murders, it’s the biggest of crimes to steal that little opportunity for an occasional change of mood.
If the play really failed in something, it was in developing the characters. The stage was too crowded, no doubt. The story was a murder mystery, granted. Aw come on, there had to be eight murders in under 3 hours! That’s granted too. But are those really valid excuses for not developing a single character? For all you know, the dolls that kept vanishing from time to time during the course of the story, had better personality. Isn’t it strange that after it was all over, those dolls remained with me more than any of the living characters?
