A haunting look at memory, love and loss with Silvatein

Bengaluru-based theatre group Qissa Collective’s Silvatein (Wrinkles) made its Kolkata debut with three well-received performances—on June 6 at the Usha Ki Kiran Theatre Festival hosted by Rangakarmee, June 7 at Anuchintan Arts Centre, and June 8 at The Urban Theatre Project.

Originally written in English by playwright and theatre academic Shatarupa Bhattacharya, Silvatein was translated into Hindi by Puneet Gupta and presented by executive producer Shubham Roy Choudhury. It is a relationship story suspended in a liminal space—between timelines, truths, and people who may or may not have ever been together. The abstract setting: a Kolkata home that may no longer exist.

Arijit, a 30-something man, believes the woman who walks in is his estranged wife, Rupali. She, however, has no memory of this marriage—or her identity in relation to him. They speak lovingly of two children, yet they are not shared. This confusion gives way to an emotional claustrophobia: a heavy layering of misaligned memories, love and regret, where “truth” is slippery and guilt offers no redemption. “What are we doing, but listening to each other’s lies?” Rupali asks.

Bhattacharya's lens is unabashedly feminist and deeply personal. Influenced by the revenge myth of Medea, the debut playwright weaves fragments of her own relationships into a play she calls an “authentic piece” of herself. It plays out like an everyday story, its power rooted in its unadorned dialogue.

Ujani Ghosh and Sagnik Sinha are compelling as Rupali and Arijit. The duo command attention through 90 reflective minutes of ebbing conflict, broken only by silence and light. Silvatein thrives in intimate spaces—the closer the audience, the greater the unease.

Ghosh’s calm stoicism as Rupali builds steadily, culminating in a symbolic, stinging slap for Arijit—her emotionally aggressive, now-deceased husband. Her rendition of Aye Tobe Sahachari, a Rabindrasangeet that connects her pain, her children, and her final liberation, is chillingly brilliant.

Sinha’s Arijit is at once familiar and broken—a patriarchal everyman whose vulnerability occasionally peeks through. Ultimately, the play exists solely within his mind.

“I was always going to tell women’s stories that many of us could relate to,” Bhattacharya said. An “autopsy of incompatibility,” Silvatein is more than a woman’s story—it is a stark meditation on memory, illusion, and how relationships never really end, only begin anew.

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