aRanya's Colour Blind - Play Review

There was just a thin crease between the audience and the stage which lead me to its symbolic interpretation. Indeed there is a thin crease. Both involve active participation of the audience. However, things are so mild on this side. Being an audience is an easy job. It’s only when your take a step to other side is when you realizes the intricacies and hardship of performing a play. It is a heck some job but worth the appraise one receive. 

This production team has already performed twice in the day and this was their third and final performance of 1 February 2015. I was eager to see what Color Blind withheld for me. Color Blind is written by Durijottam Bhatachaterjee, Kaliki Koechlin and Manav Kaul. It is directed by Manav Kaul and performed by Swanand Kirkire who plays death , Satyajit Sharma who plays the old Tagore as well as the professor, Ajitesh Gupta, Kaliki Koechlin who does the dual role of Research student and O Campo. Also, there are Amrita Bagchi, Chitangada Chakraborty and others in the play.

Color Blind - a play so vast in it spectrum that it enrolls ages of a man, a legend into a few hours. The play in its structure rolls up and down the line of time in the life of Tagore adding a distinct, a mere humane dimension to the holy character of Rabindranath Tagore. We see him through the vain eyes of a research student in the play who happens to be writing the play on Tagore. We see Tagore’s interaction with death as it kept visiting him regularly when taking away his near and dear ones one by one since he was a child, beginning with his mother. In return Tagore bargained for a pen with which he keeps on writing through his tragic time in life. The ink of which pen’s lies with Tagore in his spirit towards life with which he sails by writing and writing more, drawing from the tragic instances of his life.

 Finally, death arrives for him, but Tagore having accomplished so much in life has still the desire to achieve more. It seems as though he keeps sifting through vast majority of his work just in search of a song, a form of completeness in his life. This is how the research student puts it which she shows through the story which she has written within the play. Part of her story shows Tagore a youth writing stories and searching for a much cherished song from his childhood. He urges his beloved to sing it to him as he is going away with death. And just before he leaves he wishes to hear that last song. The characters of this story seem distorted, directing each other, going with the flow of the writer who keeps changing her mind about character’s name and relation between each other. But, I suppose that’s a way in which the writer intends Tagore to be searching for the last song.

The play depicts Tagore as a man of 63 who meets Victoria O Campo, his Argentinean admirer during his journey to Peru where he stops at O Campo’s Villa for a few weeks. There, they develop a spiritual relationship to say but there as sparks flying as we see the man in Tagore coming out in sexual intimacies between Tagore and O campo. She brings out the child there is within Tagore, whom he interacts with during a conversation with O Campo. He translates poems for her and begins painting for her just so she could understand his work. O Campo urges Tagore to stay back while he urges her to come to Shantiniketan. But fate has its way as they part never to meet again. They keep writing letters to each other until O Campo breaks this cord and Tagore is blinded in love. 

Color Blind brings out Tagore not as a legend but Tagore a man known by his relationships. It explores his ties with his childhood, his beloved through his love encounters, his works, his quest for completeness – the final song of his life and his relation with death. His work is so unique that it seems the real writer is someone else and Tagore is a different person in himself. All this comes out in the conversation between the research student and her professor who challenges her bold claims about Tagore’s relationship with O Campo. This conversation gives way to what we can call small tale of love between them. The professor is a Bengali and resembles to Tagore is little ways while the student seems drawn to him for those attributes. In a midst we hear a rock version of Tagore’s music giving a picture of the contemporary version that has evolved of Tagore.

Among all of this a little lad who stays on and off throughout the pay. He is playing Tagore’s fascinating childhood with the games he played, the things he created, his experience and his imaginative powers which stay on with Tagore till his later life and it gives way to his creativity. Tagore later in his life yearns for the song he sang in childhood. He even punishes himself like he used to be when he was little – by dipping his face in a bucket full of water. Like each one of us Tagore hopes to catch back his childhood.

 After having separated from O Campo and having written dozens of other works, his death arrives to him in a very beautiful manner, just as he fathomed. Having known Tagore, even death assumes that Tagore has already crafted his head a poem on departure from the world. To their surprise, he hasn’t. He, his age versions and the writer (that is the research student writing an end to her play) recite a few lines in unison pondering on how death would be. Would it be lovely? As a day arise signifying the revolution, the renaissance from Tagore’s works, death says that there is no more the need of a lamp (The Dia) death blows it away and along leaves Tagore taking his exit from the world.

The play uses a lot of Tagore’s work – his poetry and songs. It makes use of French and Bengali language to indulge its audience. The set of the play is very minimal but very classy. A part of a seat laid with chairs and table for the professor and the research student in the front. A net mesh wall on which inscribed are Tagore’s incomplete work laced with scribbles in chalk, behind which is a seat and area reserved for Tagore’s encounters with O Campo.The net creates a breathtaking effect as though viewing Tagore’s inner story in the drafts of his works. The third layer of stage is a long platform at the back for the artists within the research student’s story. The stage craft display multiple layers just as the plot is multi-layered creating a wonderful visual effect. Color Blind as the name suggest is a very pale tale of a legendary man which reveals the artist within each one of us.