Kroetz's ‘Request Concert’ in India, Part One: Calcutta

Abstract

What happens when a play without words, about one evening in the life of a lonely middle-aged woman, is transposed from its original bourgeois German setting into that of a deprived Indian city? Rustom Bharucha, himself born in Calcutta and now an expatriate living in the USA, was so impressed by an American production of Franz Xaver Kroetz's Request Concert that, together with a German colleague Manuel Lutgenhorst, he set out to relate the problems, theatrical and social, posed by this one-woman play to the conditions of nine Asian cities over a period of three years. He began in his native city, where Kroetz's Fraulein Rasch became the unmarried office-worker Joya Sen in the performance by Calcutta actress Usha Ganguli. The rehearsals and the final production – in a converted puppet theatre – were illuminating both in the similarities and the differences they revealed between East and West, and in this, the first of three accounts of Request Concert in its Indian productions, Rustom Bharucha records the mutual learning process involved in a fascinating intercultural experience.