Protarona A Bengali Adaptation Of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal By Mukhomukhi

“In the dictionary of psychology, adultery is neither a sin nor a sacred act. It is more a matter of the body than of the heart. It is first and last, a satisfaction of the sexual urge. Sexual fidelity is not the same as love. An adulterer may be as genuinely in love with his/her spouseas is his counterpart” says Dr. Mahesh Gandhi, psychiatrist, Lokmanya Tilak Hospital, Bombay.

But who said Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter’s 1978 play Betrayal is about adultery? Adultery seems to be as universal, and in some instances, as common, as marriage itself. The attitude towards adultery within different cultures varies widely. Under ancient Hindu law, marriage was an indissoluble sacrament, and not even a wife’s adulter y unattende d by degradation could sever the legal tie and dissolve the marriage act. In the modern Hindu code, divorce will be granted to either offended party, but not for occasional violations; the spouse may actually be living in adultery with another.

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The late Soumitra Chatterjee translated the original Pinter play from English to Bengali so the change in language also dictated that the ambience, the characters and their evolution through the play must needs become “Indian” too. Poulomi, who has directed the play, has done the needful, changing the name s of the characters as well as the place s and given them a Bengali-Hindu-Kolkata identity. The word adultery at once conjures up the figure of a wife who has had a sexual relationship with a man other than her husband and not of a husband who has had sex wih a woman not his wife, which is integrated within the social ethos of Indian culture.

This, despite the fact that b o th configurations do occur in India. But, within the social realm, a wife who has committe d adulter y becomes a social outcast and her act of adultery is considered to be a crime. The legal statutes, as we have seen, do not agree. Yet, both social norms and legal statutes, in their own different and sexist ways, victimise the woman and not the man. But Pinter kept the physical aspect of the relationship between Rajat and Paula at An understated level highlighting and raising questions about whether this could be deemed “adultery” at all just on the basis of both of them being married to different partners.

Rajat (Sudip Mukherjee) is married to Juthika who remains off-stage through the play while Paula (Poulomi Chatterjee Bose) is married to Arindam (Padmanabha Dasgupta) who happens to be the best friend of Rajat since they were mere boys. This three-character intense play features several time leaps with breaks in the relationships not necessarily making the extra-marital partners feel guilty about their now- off-now- on relationship except when Paula tells Rajat that she has already confessed about their relationship to her husband the previous night.

The entire play is structured around these three characters, very successful entrepreneurs in their professional lives and seemingly fulfilled family lives which is an extremely challenging prop osition for the actors, the director and the crew. Though Betrayal might not have f it into the Indian ambience of marital morality when it was first staged in 1978, today, it is quite relevant within the Indian social environment. The play is extremely dialogue-centric with very little physical action, a challenge the three actors have been faithful to. So, today, the play has a universal appeal. The set design is structured around black, vertical partitions which are replaced and removed during scene-breaks by theatre hands smoothly.

One of these partitions looks like a mirror but it does not reflect the characters at any point allowing them to assert their own identities instead of having the scope of looking at their reflections to rethink of their own selves. The play moves to a hill station for a holiday with Paula and her husband. But Paula is haunted by her memories of having visited the same place years ago with Rajat and is pained by the memories which Arindam understands and the holiday is over. The changing ambience and the moods of the play are beautifully enriched by the imaginative background score alternating between Western orchestral harmonies and a Tagore number once.

The music enhances and enriches the performance enough to create a mesmerizing impact on the audience. Add to this the brilliant performances of the three actors though Padmanabha’s wig could do with more adapting. It looks a bit too artificial. It is not easy to stage a play authored by a multi-talented Nobel Laureate like Harold Pinter but these dedicated artistes including Bilu Dutta have filled just more than the bill demanded. The play has intellectual overtones what with the two main characters professionally associated with publishing and printing books for a livelihood and one of them very fond of Yeats and quotes him at random.

The scenes of the apartment which Rajat and Paula had bought/rented is a place of emotional nostalgia of the lovers now drifted away from each other but somehow, tied together in their past bonding. It would be in the fitness of things to close with a Pinter quote. It goes like this: I am interested primarily in people; I want to present people to the audience, worthy of their interest primarily because they are, they exist, not because of any moral the author may draw from them. (Pinter, Harold as quotêd by J’ohn Russel Taylor. Anger. and After. Hammondsworth: Middlesex. 1963. p. 296.)

(THE WRITER IS AN INDIAN FILM SCHOLAR, AUTHOR AND FREELANCE JOURNALIST.)