Originally published in Bengali almost 50 years ago, Utpal Dutt’s Barricade comes alive on the Mumbai stage in Hindustani. We speak to Sunil Shanbag about directing one of the most well-known plays of a pioneering figure of Indian theatre.
By Prachi Sibal
A theatre stalwart who inspired generations, Utpal Dutt’s work has rarely been read in languages other than the original Bengali. In 2022, when academic Ananda Lal translated Barricade, one of Dutt’s longest-running plays, for Seagull Books, veteran theatre-maker Sunil Shanbag took notice. He was no stranger to Dutt’s pathbreaking work and had memories of a spectacular production of the play that ran for nearly 20 years.
Barricade was written in 1972, foreshadowing Bengal’s political crisis through a story set in 1933 Germany, ahead of its complete takeover by the Nazi party. It was a period when ideological clashes led to the burning of books among other events, symbolic of the rise of authoritarianism, at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Shanbag got a glimpse at Lal’s translation before it was published. “It was so fantastic and so contemporary, I knew I had to do this play,” he tells us. Shanbag sought permission from Bishnupriya Dutt, professor of theatre and performance studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and Utpal Dutt’s daughter, to stage Barricade. Next, for over a year, he devoted his time to reading and researching literature from 1930s Germany. Asad Hussain translated the script into Hindustani from Lal’s translation.
The original play begins with an address by a sutradhar, as justification for why a play set in Nazi Germany could be relevant to contemporary politics in Bengal. Shanbag chose to do away with the narrator’s prologue and set Barricade entirely in Germany. “The idea was to create a distance. I wanted the audience to engage with it intellectually and not just emotionally. There has to be a certain unfamiliarity. That’s when intellectual awareness sets in,” says the director.
Shanbag also chose Hindustani with a smattering of German, for greater accessibility. “The original play is written in Bengali and about Germany. So, it is already once removed in terms of language. There is no language specificity as such,” he adds.
Creative choices and challenges
The play opened in August at the Prithvi Theatre to packed shows. The politics of the play resonated with viewers familiar with German history, Shanbag tells us. But it also struck a chord with those who could simply engage with the drama onstage. “For some, it became a reaffirmation of a specific worldview. Older people tend to understand the connections far quicker, and the younger people come upon it. If you surrender to the narrative of the play, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know the history. It’s a story and the events punctuated with drama can also be looked at just as plot points,” he explains.
Shanbag has high praise for Lal’s annotated translation that offers an insight into the politics of the time and the original dramatic choices made by Dutt. He has, however, taken a few creative liberties with Barricade. Firstly, it has been edited for length, and now has a runtime of 120 minutes. Secondly, he chose to cast a woman in the character of a communist written for a man. “I made one of the dissenting characters a woman because I thought it was important to have a female voice. One of the problems with the older communist parties was that they were patriarchal,” he notes.
Shanbag, who has watched bits of Dutt’s original production, tells us the other differences are stylistic, to cater to the new audience today. “Dutt always said his theatre is propaganda. He played to the masses and scoffed at theatre that took place in silos. It is why he took to jatra [a Bengali folk theatre form that originated in the 15th century] in a big way. He played to a much more diverse audience than we do,” says Shanbag, adding, “Stylistically, this affects a lot of things. The plays of the jatra were larger than life and had a dramatic register which worked on that scale. Our aesthetic is different. But incredibly, the piece allows for both”.
Beyond stylistic considerations, the challenge with staging Barricade was to ensure the characters do not appear one-dimensional. “The characters appear like stereotypes; the fascist officer, the corrupt journalist, the idealistic communist. But the possibility of nuance exists in the script. One only had to find it,” says Shanbag.
Setting the stage
Next came the task of building layers around the play. “From the music to the movement to the archival footage, everything needed to be an integral part of the production, not just an add-on,” says Shanbag. For the stage design, Shayonti Salvi chose to use the vertical dimension of the theatre space to express the symbols associated with the characters together with the depiction of the overriding presence of Nazis at the cusp of an authoritarian regime. “For example, with the communists, the banner uses Marx’s handwritten diaries. Warm colours are used for the communist camaraderie and colder ones for the more formal Nazis,” Shanbag explains.
As with Shanbag’s other work, music is a distinct part of the narrative. He uses a different genre and composer to represent each ideology. “The Nazi party tried to control all cultural expression. Hitler was quite conservative in his taste. Jazz, swing and atonal music were rejected. The music of composers like Wilhelm Richard Wagner was preferred. It was also a way to ensure Jewish musicians lost work,” he explains. So, in the play, Wagner’s music represents the Nazi ideology, while swing—which could only be heard as part of the underground swing movement going on at the time— stands in for the communists.
The challenge then was to find music suitable for the central character of the widow. Editor and author Naresh Fernandes nudged Shanbag towards conductor and composer Walter Kaufmann’s music. “Interestingly, Kaufmann, a Jewish composer, found his way to British India amid Nazi persecution. He was made the head of All India Radio and composed their signature tune. The ARC Ensemble, Canada, specialises in recreating music by artistes suppressed by authoritarian regimes, and many of them were Jewish composers. I was impressed by the first Kaufmann piece I heard by them and sought permission to use it,” Shanbag says.
Barricade is returning to the stage at a time when we find ourselves questioning if we could be on the cusp of authoritarianism. In an interview with Scroll, Lal, whose translation of Barricade has received acclaim, said, “Dutt felt that 1933 Germany was being repeated in 1970s Kolkata, and exactly 50 years later, what he wrote resonates for us again.”
This article was originally published in the October 2024 issue of ON Stage.