Noted theatre troupe of the country Dhaka Theatre brought French novelist Albert Camus’ famous novel The Outsider on stage.
Translated and directed respectively by Rubaiyat Ahmed and Nasir Uddin Yusuff, the play staged its press show on Friday at the Studio Theatre Hall of Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.
Both the translator and director took liberty to trim the philosophic novel down into a play version. While the attempt to retain the original tone and tenor of the novel is praiseworthy, an added segment of another short play, penned by the translator, caused more harm than benefit to the production.
The Outsider, published during the Second World War in 1942, portrays the ineffectuality and meaninglessness of human life through its central character Meursault, an Algerian.
Meursault is an ostensibly disinterested person to the point of neglecting his personal well-being and future. His disinterested demeanour and deportment, nonchalant speeches, all trigger to a man who is well-aware of ‘the absurd in life’.
Dhaka theatre’s production tried to catch all these nuances of a classic character. The play version tried to show how coldly and dispassionately Meursault reacted to his mother’s death, how enigmatically he dated a girl just after his mother’s burial.
But Rafiqul Islam, who enacted Meursault, did not seem to be able to capture and project the accurate bearing of the character. That’s perhaps why Islam’s expression could not give the impression of a dispassionate yet conflicted man that Meursault is.
The later scenes of the play were, however, well rendered. The scene where Meursault kills a man whom he does not know personally, with whom he has no enmity of note and the trial of Meursault, where he shows even greater derision and disdain towards life looked befittingly performed.
The set and costume design are also quite praiseworthy. Shimul Yusuff, who directed the music, did a splendid job. She selected from Mozart, Bach, Beatles and others to provide music in the background to accompany the happenings on stage.
The effect of the play was damaged by an addition of a 15 minute production titled Kobi. Written by Rubaiyat Ahmed, the concluding segment shed light on the incongruities of the social and state apparatuses such as court, politics, ruling system and rulers. This portion, however, acted as a backfire as it seemed quite out of place to Camus’ The Outsider and the play version of it that Dhaka Theatre produced.
Though it was a press show, a few young and seasoned theatre activists were also present. One of them who wish to remain anonymous, said, ‘I do not understand why they included the last segment by a local playwright. Did they think Camus’ The Outsider was not complete in meaning?’
The director of the production admitted that there are spaces to work on and said, ‘It is immensely difficult to bring such a richly philosophic novel on stage’.
The play will soon be premiered for audience.
-With New Age input
