Review: The absurd carnival of Mikhail Bakhtin

First, it was the title of the play that intrigued thoroughly — Bakhtin Bakhtin. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher and literary critic who was discussed and evaluated only by a niche academia. I was keen to see how Bakhtin’s philosophies were dealt with in popular culture. The attempt itself is valiant.

Bakhtin Bakhtin is a difficult play. Not only because of the subject matter, but also in the way director Goutam Sarkar has interwoven aspects of the philosopher’s ideas like dialogy, chronotope or carnivalesque.

In the play, the protagonist, Bakhtin, lives on Sitaram Ghosh Street. He encounters a corpse of a woman who fell from the sky near Medical College. Bakhtin fights away the canines that hound the corpse. But cops take the body away to the morgue. Bakhtin falls in love with the corpse and names her Anamika. The play deals with Bakhtin’s dialogue with the corpse, his interpretation of modern-day language or the death of it, and his relation with his exploiters, called the maliks (owners).

Bakhtin also heads an orchestra called Carnival. The orchestra demonstrates different kinds of communication events through songs, dances and recitals. These performances often tend to be anti-authority and sabotaging, in accordance with the Bakhtin doctrine.

But the show falters. The playwright (Chiranjib Basu) tries to include all the theoretical aspects of a philosopher’s work in a one-hour play. It’s tiring. The play reminds us of the anti-novel genre of Subimal Misra. However, when Misra argues in favour of absurdity, theory and rhetoric do not overwhelm the aesthetics in their art. This, however, is not true for Bakhtin Bakhtin.

Also the performances of the actors are tiring sometimes. Maybe the burden of theory overwhelms some of the actors. Sometimes they overtly express a character’s emotion and sometimes they whisper — so much so that it became difficult to hear at the back. However, the concluding poem (written by the playwright) and the play’s music (Dron Acharya) is fantastic.

Having said this, the play also deserves kudos. In an era when easy reads and readymade films and plays are the fad, the playwright and the director dare to challenge the convention through a non-linear form and plot without a central idea. The play compels the spectator to think. Perhaps this is the main achievement of Bakhtin Bakhtin.