Story of a Director – THE FINAL CURTAIN
Photo credit: dieraecherin from morguefile.com
The theatre hall was packed. In fact it had people, of all shapes and sizes (meaning of differing years and human body constructions) sitting on the steps leading to the aisle seats. The hall with a hundred years reputation behind it, was celebrating the fiftieth performance of Samuel Beckett‘s Waiting For Godot, by the theatre group, Final Curtain. The group had had other performances of plays by reputed playwrights to its credit. The founder of Final Curtain, Shobhan Chowdhury Gomes, was a veteran in the theatre circuit. Now aged fifty (the coincidence was not deliberate), he is the professor of English Literature at a college in the southern part of his hometown, Kolkata. Shobhan is a Bengali Christian and his family had been so for generations. In fact, his lineage took him back to Sir William Carey, who in the early years of the nineteenth century, had translated the Bible into Bengali (and also Sanskrit).
“Shobhan da, all the tickets have been sold out. The audience are shouting for the stage performance to start,” informed a panting Siddhartha. Siddhartha Sen, a leading member of the group and also a social activist, has been with Final Curtain since its inception years. Incidentally Siddhartha is playing Estragon in this stage adaptation of Beckett’s play which had taken the literary world by storm, when it had appeared.
“If one has to study philosophy and, above everything else, the existentialists of the likes of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Heidegger, one has to read and analyse Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot first and foremost,” Professor Chowdhury Gomes always reiterated in his lecture classes. Shobhan having been himself an avid bibliophile, staging plays with the ultimate goal of forming his own theatre group, had been one of his cherished dreams. Having had his education from his alma mater, Presidency College, he now divides his time between delivering lectures at his college, which is not every day and staging rehearsals for forthcoming productions. Dark, tall, with an impeccable accent which friends and associates revered, Shobhan Chowdhury Gomes was perfection personified.
Yet somewhere deep inside, Shobhan is essentially a loner. An avowed celibate (close friends relate it to a broken affair) he has a handful of friends with whom he shares and is reciprocated. His lectures are well attended and girls simply drool over his mannerisms, which some feel to be mere affectations. Like stopping in mid sentence, with “You know”, the other day when he was delivering a lecture on ‘Modern Poetry’. He usually performs a shrug of his shoulder blades when entering the staff room of the college, holding a cigarette, dangling almost from his thin, fragile (almost effeminate) fingers. Or, more often, he stubs out one when entering his class to deliver one of his most awaited lectures. He always ended his classes after any euphoric deliverance with ‘Amen’.
Today as Shobhan Chowdhury Gomes was supervising the last –minute make-up touches to the four actors who would be taking the stage by storm in the next couple of minutes his mind was travelling back to the days when he had staged the first public performance of Waiting For Godot at the Academy. The Academy of Fine Arts in Calcutta had always had an elite crowd as audience.
“Sir,” one of his students, Gaurav, had said to him that day. “Can I touch feet? I want to be a theatre activist like you and would like to join your theatre group.”
The look of undisguised reverence in his student’s eyes had moved Shobhan that day. He had formed Final Curtain with a handful of his students – some from his college, some from his home-tutoring classes. He used to be assigned the paper ‘English Drama’ for his classes at the University. Just like a teacher teaching his students the different parts of the human body in an anatomy session, Shobhan used to dissect the plays into shreds of cloth until the bare structure of the author’s creation remained. His students used to enjoy his lectures so thoroughly that rumours abounded about girls used to address anyone who appeared to be remotely good-looking, as being “just like Shobhan Chowdhury Sir”.
The director-cum-actor-cum-professor had had a very ordinary upbringing. Born into a lower middle class family, who hailed themselves from the distant shores of East Bengal, Chowdhury had shown talent right from an early age. His father was a converted Bengali Christian. The lineage with William Carey came from his wife, Elizabeth Gomes’s side. Shobhan had exhibited acumen in the field of the arts right from an early age.
“Shobhan’ll outshine others in languages. You mark my words,” his grandmother had said, one day to his father.
The Academy of Fine Arts represented what Prithvi Theatre is to Mumbai. For Calcuttans, it was the ‘ultimate’ in theatre experience and for theatre-directors it stood for a historical lineage and a sense of pride to be able to host a theatrical production at its Proscenium stage. There are many more theatre halls in this city. Yet the Academy stands in a class unto itself. Serious productions, not those which are made purely for commercial reasons, are performed here. The cushioned seats, now in sorry states of disrepair, have seen many glorious days. To be able to perform at the Academy before an elite and discerning audience is the pinnacle of group theatre productions in the city.
“I do not want the prompters to be seated before the stage. It might be better to have them near the wings,” Shobhan was giving his last minute instructions to the stage manager, another of his bright students, Ira Gupta.
“Sir, the people are shouting for the curtain to be pulled up out there. It is a packed hall today. Ira, are you aware that all the tickets for this performance had been sold out several days prior to this,” one student, who was in charge of announcing the commencement of the play, said panting, after having run all the way from the main gates of the theatre hall.
“Ira, let the audience wait for a couple of minutes more. But I want ABSOLUTELY NO props around when the play is being performed. And by that I mean there should be no shaded curtains hanging at the back. Remove them as fast as you can,” Shobhan almost barked into Ira’s ears.
“Beckett had wanted his play to be the epitome of absurd theatre. No props, no frills, just the characters and their dialogues,” he added.
“PULL UP THE CURTAINS.”
The mere drop of a pin could be heard from the absolute silence which followed the call to pull up the curtains from the director.
The play commences. The actors, playing the roles of Vladimir and Estragon, pull up mammoth performances. Shobhan had lectured them umpteen numbers of times on the need to bring forward the absurdity of the situation. There had been workshops and rigorous rehearsals before the final production.
What no one noticed was the fact that Shobhan himself had been ill on the final day of actual performance. He didn’t inform anyone of his theatre group that he was unwell. He had been suffering from a chronic pulmonary disease and the doctor had advised Shobhan to take complete rest and abstain from smoking. But old habits die hard. The crescendo of expectation and anticipation, with the ultimate staging of his cherished project, had taken a big toll both on his health and his lungs. The fits of coughing that had interrupted many a rehearsal in the beginning, had evolved into a symptom where Shobhan was spitting blood with his cough.
Ira watched from the wings how the coughing of their director seemed to have aggravated. She was the sole witness when Shobhan eventually fell down and lost his consciousness while the play was going on in full swing. Ira rushed to the back of the wings and knelt down beside their professor.
“Sir, can I fetch you some water?” Ira whispered silently, so as not to impede the ongoing performance.
No response. Ira began to shake Shobhan with all her might. Still their beloved professor’s head remained in a hanging state on her shoulders. Panic drove Ira to sheer desperation. She opened a water can and poured the entire amount over his head. It was then that she realised that their ‘Shobhan Chowdhury Sir’ had left them forever.
“You know, Ira, it’s every artist and performer’s dream to cease living or to die when at the helm of his success. I would like my death to come when I am in the middle of a performance. I do not want to burden anybody with my troubles. Death should come when I would be waiting for it, just as one waits for one’s paramour,” Shobhan’s words kept ringing in Ira’s ears, as she sat motionless with his head hanging from her shoulders.
As the final curtain came down after a thunderous round of deafening applause from the audience, Shobhan had passed to his another land, the hall of fame where all great artists dwelt.
Ira had realised the calamitous moment the instant it had happened. But she did not move. Just like the two characters on stage, Vladimir and Estragon, these two real life characters fail to execute thought to action. None of them move. One does not move because life had been snatched out of him and the other, because she is too stunned to think about mobility.
Absurdity resides in that twilight zone where fiction meets with facts, where life encounters its mimetic reproduction, where fictional characters are brought to life by real-life ones.
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