22/08/2026
Review | Angina Jure Bhor – a Haunting Elegy of Bengal's Vanishing Stages
Some theatres survive in brick and mortar. Others survive only in memory. Angina Jure Bhor, written and directed by Dr Gaurav Das and presented by Aneek, stands uneasily, and movingly, at the threshold between the two: a play about a vanishing space, and more profoundly, about everything that vanishes with it — voices, bodies, rituals, friendships, failures, ambitions, the accumulated breath of generations.
Set against the spectral ruin of the Circarena auditorium, the production circles a question that grows more urgent by the season: when a performance space dies, who mourns it, and who remembers what once lived there? The answer arrives through Nafeez, a young scholar who comes to the crumbling RadhaRani Mancha in North Kolkata chasing its lost history, and finds instead a house of ghosts. Chief among them is Joydeb Debsharma, an octogenarian theatre-owner whose frail body holds an astonishing reservoir of memory, and his blind wife Damayanti Sen, slipping by degrees into her own uncertain terrain. Memory here is never stable; it breaks, repeats, returns unbidden, and vanishes the moment one reaches for it.
Das builds the piece like an excavation. Nafeez digs for facts and unearths stories instead: Joydeb's journey from rural Dinajpur, where he danced Gomira, to Kolkata's seductive and treacherous theatre world — a passage of aspiration and exploitation, love and compromise.
The production's finest achievement is its refusal to treat folk forms as museum pieces. Gomira, Khon Palagaan, Halua Haluani and Jatra enter not as decoration but as living current, interrupting realism and letting the past flood the present. Nayan Sadhak and Samar Mridha's choreography turns bodies into archive, gesture into inheritance; Chakropani Dev's music lends the evening an expansive, often haunting texture; Saikat Manna and Rahul Sardar's lighting gives the ruin a dreamlike instability, while Adrish Kumar Ray's spare design trusts, rightly, that an empty space can speak louder than a crowded one.
The ensemble is finely judged. Anubhab Sengupta gives Nafeez an unaffected curiosity; Arup Roy lends the elder Joydeb quiet gravity; Tapati Bhattacherji brings tenderness to Damayanti without reducing her to pathos. Bhaskar Banik is especially fine as the young Joydeb, catching that difficult meeting-point of innocence and ambition. Niladri Mukherjee, Samriddhi Banerjee, Srijak Chatterjee and Avinandana Dey, among others, deepen the production's shifting, layered world.
At 150 minutes the play sometimes strains under its own abundance — a few threads go only partly resolved, and the score occasionally crowds out the dialogue it should be serving. These are small fissures in an ambitious, deeply felt work.
What lingers afterwards is not just Joydeb's story but the idea of the angina itself: the courtyard as a space of gathering and shared life, and a quiet argument that what is truly endangered is not folk form alone but the collective spaces where art once belonged to everyone. The title holds its own paradox of dusk and dawn — this is a work steeped in loss, yet never a funeral song. The stage may crumble, the lights may go out, the courtyard may fall silent. But somewhere in the dark, someone is still telling the story.
Review by: Tamal Mukherjee
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