Week-long Debshankar

“I cannot really judge this event separately or the response it will produce. To me it’s just part of what I do and will continue doing in life,” said actor Debshankar Halder just before the commencement of a week-long theatre festival featuring him.

The festival focussing on plays featuring Halder commenced on Friday, 16 April at the Academy of Fine Arts. With Halder mostly in the lead, the festival weaves a series of nine plays by eight theatre groups over seven days, in productions both light-hearted and serious.

The festival is the brainchild of theatre group Rangapat which came up with the idea of re-introducing the actor’s verve to Kolkata's theatre-lovers.

“It attempts to present an actor in several roles to an audience who in all probability has seen the plays before,” Halder said. “However, seeing them back-to-back is a new experience, as you cannot record theatre, you have to perform it. Since the eight theatre groups agreed to the concept, my job is to come on stage and play my part.”

The festival began on 16 April with Furut, a play based on Upendrakishore Ray Chauduri’s story Tuntuni. Here, fun and fantasy come together in Halder's portrayal of the king.

On 17 April, Halder has two performances. The first, Iye, is a Bengali translation of a foreign play. In this, Halder is the sole actor on stage for two hours. Up next is the controversial Winkle Twinkle. This has Halder playing a senior communist who falls asleep in a park for 25 years. He awakes to find his party in power. But this ruling party is vastly different from the principles with which he had envisioned it. Halder has to portray the conflict within the character as his ideals clash with the reality he wakes up to.

Rangapat’s signature production Aurangzeb will be staged Sunday, 18 April. “Here we present the transformation that this Mughal emperor went through during his last days where he revisits and repents on his strategy,” said Tapanjyoti Das, one of the organisers of the festival. “I think this play appeals to people because of the current context of terrorism, and Aurangzeb’s final conciliatory note somehow strikes a chord of sanity in the world we live in,” he added.

Later the same evening, Halder performs in Missed Call. The actor himself has written the script of this urban saga about two brothers plagued by the ubiquitous use of mobile phones. In this psychological drama, he pairs up with filmmaker Gautam Halder.

19 April brings Halder on stage as singer Debabrata Biswas – portraying the artist's life, his struggles and his conflicts. The play is Ruddha Sangeet, and one that has brought Halder much critical acclaim.

Aguner Bornomala on 20 April, is a psychological play, where Halder tries to help out a young man in trouble. Scheduled for the following day is Nandikar’s Madhabi, where Halder plays a sage.

The concluding play, Kacher Manus, is based on a Marathi play. Here Halder is a Brahmin who believes in the caste system, yet circumstantial realities force him to be tended to by a lower caste nurse. The rigid Brahmin softens and the nurse helps cure him of his illness and his misconceptions.

To Halder, the festival is a platform to do something new – for him, for the city's theatre addicts and for theatre itself as a professional pursuit.

“My initial thought was that people of Kolkata have seen all the plays before, so why would they dive into their pockets to come see the same nine plays again? But I was wrong,” Halder said. “I think people are excited to have this sort of a festival and they want to explore what it would be like to have a single actor come before them through various characters. It’s new to them,” he added.


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