Theatre review: Dirgho Din Dwogdho Raat

Director: Ashok Mukhopadhyay
Duration: 100 minutes
Cast: Ashok Mukhopadhyay, Loknath Dey,

Nayana Saha

Rating: **1/2

A man’s home is his own

castle

. He chooses to be himself and brushes nasty secrets under the rug. What he often ignores is that these secrets can become a mountain of bitterness. American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s acclaimed work,

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

, tells the story of a family where the members ferociously stand against each other as the mountain of bitterness explodes one day. It is nothing short of a volcano from which resentments, accusations and hatred ooze out to wreak havoc on the family. Keeping the basic tenets of the play intact,

Dirgho Din Dwogdho Raat

incorporates a bit of Indianness in its adaptation, but manages to present only the clichéd concoction of a family drama.
Dipesh Sanyal (Ashok Mukhopadhyay) — the patriarch of the Sanyal family — is a successful yesteryear thespian. Like a typical Bengali intellectual, he loves to drop names like Badal Sircar and Shakespeare. His ailing wife, Charu (Suranjana Dasgupta), wants to see a happy family. She plans to have a family get-together and persuades her children — son Rupu (Loknath Dey) and daughter Buli (Bindia Ghosh) — to spend a Sunday with them. However, when the day comes, all hell breaks loose.
While Dipesh becomes a target, Buli and Rupu vent their bottled-up anger on their father. Buli is a loudmouth and insensitive. Her self-defeating attempt of blaming her parents for her broken marriage shows her frustration and lack of judgment. Rupu, who is a journalist, expresses his resentment in a subtler and sarcastic manner. Soon, some ugly truths come out and the much-revered Sanyal family starts to wash dirty linen in public.
The play primarily suffers from a sloppy script and boring, clichéd dialogues. The first half, where the story pans out, is ridiculously melodramatic — way more than the standards of Bengali daily soaps. Erratic name dropping, tedious monologues and slow pace plague the first half. The play comes back to life with certain dramatic moments in the second half, but unfortunately, fails to end well. The last scene looks imposed and the playwright seems to be in a hurry to force a happy ending.
However, there are certain interesting elements. The story delves into the eternal conflict between youth and old age, which is nicely represented. The backdrop that depicts the boundary wall of the Sanyal mansion of Duttapukur is dotted with holes, representing the lacuna in old values.
In the acting department, Nayana Saha as Nirmala, the maid, overshadows everyone on stage. Her diction is convincing as her character is shown as hailing from Madhupur. Her rendition of two songs is also music to the ears. While Bindiya as Buli goes overboard with her show of emotions in a few places, she also delivers a powerful performance. Barring a few unnecessary melodramatic bits, the performances are more or less good.
Though it is far from a flawless production, one can watch it for the crisis it deals with. It is easy for a middle-class Bengalis to relate to this.