Meeting Of Strangers turned Collaborators

Today, I had a wonderful meeting with Lemona Chanda, a very enthusiastic theatre lover visiting from England. The meeting was occasioned by our common desire to produce a play titled "শকুন্তলা আজকাল" (Shakuntala, nowadays) scripted by Choyon Khairul Habib, a self-exiled Bangladeshi playwright who is living in France for the past couple of decades. Choyon has a few plays to his credit and has famously translated Wole Soyinka in 1990. Notably, his translation রক্তবীজ was later anthologized by Shibnarayan Roy in his celebrated Anthology of African Literature in Bengali. Even so, his writing delves deep into the myths and rituals of the Bengal region, and inevitably draws on the two great Indian epics. Meanwhile, Choyon has been busy inventing a new idiom, a new nomenclature for the Bengali theatre.   

Nandalal Bose's Shakuntala

Lemona is a trained lawyer who completed her bar from Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar, and this legal grounding shaped her deep interest in disadvantaged people, which in turn drew her to the story of Shakuntala. She runs online platforms that work with indigenous and marginalised communities, and she feels deeply motivated by giving voice to the emotions and thoughts of people on the margins. She is also motivated by the idea that this play could be performed in front of audiences living on the periphery of the city, in front of marginalised communities, and that the play should be made available to people whose lives are often treated as unimportant. 

We talked with a lot of passion about our shared goals for theatre, our thoughts on how we see ourselves growing as artists, and how we want our work to stay people-oriented and meaningful.

Later, we were joined by Talha Zubayr, chief secretary of theatre group Actomania. Together we had a great discussion about the new Shakuntala project. Shakuntala is a two-character play featuring the mythical figures Shakuntala and Menoka. It was exciting to talk about how Choyon has given the story a fresh, contemporary interpretation. We also talked about the idea of doing a reading of the play, possibly as early as tomorrow since Lemona will be leaving next week.

During the meeting, Talha also told us about the director's workshop organized by Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy early this year. There, the course teacher, Azad Abdul Kalam, spoke about his very first play. That production, which came out in 1990, was a Bengali translation of Wole Soyinka's "The Strong Breed". The play was staged with support from the British Council and guidance from the English Department of Dhaka University. 

Azad Abdul Kalam talked about how hard it was to bring that play to the stage, and how the whole team had to work with very shoestring budget while still giving their best effort. This was especially exciting for Talha, because instead of talking about a later plays directed at Prachyanat, Azad Abdul Kalam was actually talking about the very first play he worked on, under the guidance of Choyon Khairul Habib, who translated Wole Soyinka's play into Bengali under the title "Roktobeej."

We agreed to meet again tomorrow at 2:30 at Shilpakala Academy, in Floor One, where Actomania usually holds its rehearsals for their upcoming play, The Alchemist.