BENGALURU: Bengalis in the city can get a taste of home at this play which will be staged over the weekend. Taskar Brittanto, a one-act award-winning Italian play by Nobel prize winning playwright Dario Fo, which has been translated into English as The Virtuous Burglar, will see a Bengali version (translated by Amitabh Dutta) soon in Bengaluru. Directed by Tanumay Datta of First Wing Productions (FWP), an amalgamation of professional and amateur theatre workers united by their love of the stage, the story revolves around a skillful burglar who enters a rich man’s flat assuming it is empty only to find that the house owner, an influential and politically powerful person, is having an extramarital affair. The plot thickens when the wife of the burglar as well as that of the house owner enter the scene. Damage control attempts on the owner’s part create a night of wild misunderstandings and complete confusion.
The play is a farcical comedy that exposes the lies and deceptions in the seemingly perfect life of the elite upper class. And in his version, Datta brings to the fore this class divide. “While the thief comes from a lower-class background, the house owner from an upper class struggles to maintain a certain image which often leads to deception and lies. And then it turns out that the burglar himself is virtuous,” says Datta, an engineer by profession and founder of FWP, which has staged two Bengali productions previously and has received critical acclaim at the All India Bengali Theatre Festival held in New Delhi.
Research for the production involved reading other works of Fo, which were set in a similar social context to understand the playwright’s line of thought. “It’s only after doing thorough homework did I finalise the play,” says Datta whose play comprises a seven-member cast, each of whom has a day job. In contrast to many directors who opt for minimilistic sets, Datta was clear that props were going to be an integral part of his production. “I prefer a traditional setup for my plays. The props have to evoke images, and somehow that doesn’t happen with wooden blocks for me,” says Datta, who in future, hopes to tell stories of Rabindranath Tagore, which would resonate with the current times. “And that’s something I want to do in English to reach out to a wider audience,” he says. The play will be staged at Alliance Francaise on Feb 9, 5pm and 7pm.