With one play, Tin Can, a young theatre group in Kolkata, smashed all the rules of the game. Looking back at their journey and at the people who have joined the city’s English theatre movement
Even a few years ago, English plays in Kolkata meant visibly uncomfortable men in scruffy suits mouthing Neil Simon lines with affected accents. Cane sofas passed off as sets and chipped china as props. But the 2006 play, Intro, wasn’t about white Americans. It didn’t have men in ill-fitting suits either. Instead it served up a slice of Kolkata through a montage of the sights and sounds of a busy city street. Using fantastical tableau-like situations, Intro talked about the realities of a city which is pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating and funny, all at the same time. Its characters weren’t alienating foreigners. Instead, Intro looked at the city through the eyes of its fringe dwellers—the rag pickers, beggars and incredulous characters such as “Dirt Kings”, who rule the garbage dumps of the city.

It’s a play and a style that three years on, continues to draw youngsters—theatre enthusiasts as well as the audience—into a movement. A reworked version of their first play will travel to the Exchange, a prestigious Edinburgh theatre festival, in July, bringing Tin Can’s journey full circle. But more importantly, Tin Can has inspired other theatre groups to break through the conventions of English theatre in Kolkata. “Even as students partaking in various theatre festivals, we would squirm at the sheer lack of imagination when it came to English plays in the city. And we weren’t the only one. We were fresh out of school and wanted to be heard. Tanaji (Dasgupta), who was my classmate in school, shared my vision and we decided to collaborate and our theatre group, Tin Can, was born,” says Soumyak Kanti De Biswas, the director of the play. As a student growing up in Kolkata, Kanti saw himself as the quintessential misfit. “We are all misfits, aren’t we? There is so much to take in and so little to make sense of. We needed to assimilate all this,” says Kanti, who was in the first year of college when he scripted the play.

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