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Exploring relationships A scene from “Ru-Ba-Ru”.

National School of Drama Repertory Company’s latest offering “Ru-Ba-Ru”, presented at its Sammukh theatre recently, seeks to explore the symbiotic relationship between a patient in coma and an attendant who reads her diary to her. Written by Atanu Ghosh and translated into Hindi by Kushal Sharma, though the production is neat, the scenic design imaginative, and the acting good, it leaves the audience cold because of thematic ambiguity and sketchy characterisation.

Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s film “Persona”, which is considered one of the 20th Century’s greatest works of cinematic art, the playwright tries to project his female characters as victims but he hardly touches the social, economic and gender bias to prove logically that they are really so, and hence fails to evoke much empathy from the audience. The male characters are weak to the extent of being spineless. While one disappears, deserting his family, another commits suicide after a few months of marriage with the character Sulagna. Another male character, who appears to be Sulagna’s boss, is lonely, timid and nervous and proposes to Sulagna in a rather awkward manner. These characters do not offer much in terms of social and political criticism.

In Bergman’s cinematic masterpiece, the bedridden patient is a stage actress who becomes suddenly silent after performing the play “Electra”. In the play the patient is Disha Sen, an elocutionist and voiceover artiste, who meets with an accident. It reduces her to the state of a vegetable. In the film the character of the nurse, who attends to the patient and reads her letters to her doctor, is the most important one. Between the nurse and the patient, a rare kind of relationship evolves in interactions, though the patient does not speak. A strange kind of parallel develops between them with subtle similarities between their inner troubled lives. In the closing shots the faces of the two women merge into one, symbolising that they are the two faces of the same person.

But in the play the character of the nurse is peripheral. It is Sulagna who accepts the boring job of reading the patient’s diary to her. In the few lines that Sulagna reads one, could get an idea that the patient, now in coma, has a troubled sex life. In Bergman’s film, the sexual encounter between the husband of the patient and the nurse lends complexity to the narrative and adds depth of meaning. In the play the husband is replaced with the nephew of the patient whose interactions with Sulagna, devoid of any sexual intention, tend to be unconvincing.

Scholars of film theory consider “Persona” as one of the early films in which the Brechtian concept of alienation is employed. Director Kaushik Sen is able to introduce this element at places in a subtle manner. He is also able to project the idea of man’s inability to communicate with a fellow human being in a society afflicted with alienation. The use of the mask in a sequence, the décor and the lighting project a kind of surrealistic ambiance.

“Ru-Ba-Ru” is a kind of experimental piece of theatre that makes viewing tedious and its meaning rather ambiguous.

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