Theatre moments and the search for language

Abstract

Sankha Ghosh’s essay on theatre moments and the search for language looks into the possible reasons for Tagore’s questioning of the power of words in his plays distinguished by three periods with the consecutive dominance of prose, poetry and songs or, in other words, that serve as barriers to the expression of theatrical moments. Tagore was drawing on verse forms when his contemporaries in Europe were turning towards prose as a necessary vehicle of drama. Analysing the cohesive elements that bind the plot, the characters, language and dramatic conflict, Ghosh suggests that characters in the early plays are often reminiscing, and here lyric plays an important part, but then it is not appropriate enough for theatre. At one stage, poetic plays also took respite in the form of dramatic poetry. A little later, when Tagore was going through his ‘musical era’ in poetry, while writing Tapati he stated that verse was incapable of creating various types of moods. Then his plays took recourse to a large number of songs and elsewhere he created a multilayered prose that was close to the poetic, and the characters too became multidimensional. Ghose states that it was in Dakghar that a suitable language for drama emerged where the prose created ‘a magical form in the conflict of desire and reality’. Muktadhara and Raktakarabi are again plays where the rhythm of language matches the tempo of dramatic conflict. In the next stage, that of Tapati and Bansari, there is not only an expansion within language but also an excessive preoccupation with language that the author thinks could also be a part of the struggle with inner conflicts that became a part of his life in the last ten years of his life. In the final stage, in Chandalika, Shyama and Chitrangada, he seemed to have arrived at the language he was seeking, portraying the inner complexities of his characters and the deeper meaning of the plays through music and dance. The dance-dramas were more dramatic than lyrical.