Premiere show of Kusum Bettanto staged

The play depicts the plight of the underprivileged

Swattik Natya Samradaya recently staged the premier show of their 12th production Kusum Bettanto at the Experimental Theatre Stage.

The moving story of Kusum starts with her marriage to a rich young wastrel of the same locality. In the first part of the play, the dramatist has shown the ill treatment often meted out to helpless women in their in-laws homes. Subsequent to her divorce, Kusum migrates to Dhaka and gets shelter in a slum. Here again she is face to face with the lechery of men. The melodrama has a pathetic ending : Kusum is raped and murdered by a cruel man.

As the subplot of the play, the playwright also focuses on the darker facets of society: terrorism and drugs among others. Rosy has used the dialects of Jessore and Shatkhira region for the dialogue.

However, Kusum Bettanto is not a well-constructed play. As a result the creative work, which could have been a very good story, becomes a simple melodrama.

Director Sagir Mostafa needs to pay attention to several facets of the play. For instance, the stage is not properly distributed for the blocking of the artistes and the majority of the events take place at the two wings of the stage. Furthermore, he has handled soliloquy and narration in the same manner.

As the set designer Sagir has used a few stools. Without using the fence at the backstage the same effect could have been created. Even the visibility, which is the basic requirement for light designing was not maintained. For a considerable time the performers' gestures were not visible. Without using the painted curtains at the backstage to show vulgarity, symbolic colour effects could have been used.

By and large, the artistes failed to strike a responsive chord in the audience. That is except for one encounter between Matiur Suman as Hurmat and Fuljan performed by Shantona. Lipi, as the protagonist of the play, could have done better.