Story Tellers’ 221B Baker Street, which debuted at the recent Airtel Lifestage Theatre fest is as much an engaging bit of slice-of-life play as it is a constant literary excavation. 

The play is set in the house of noted economist Ankan Mitra, who has returned to Calcutta after a prolonged stint abroad to teach at a university. A pedantic, scholar and a proud man to boot, Mitra is as easily admired and admirable as he is easy to be disliked and detested. He is as much at home in the labyrinthine riders of econometry as he is a keen observer of literary intelligence, especially those of the investigative genre. His schadenfreude, so to say, lies in him taunting those around him, more specifically his wife, with the fount of knowledge that he both lives for and swears by. No wonder his life centres on his many many books and his own private Brubeck, Beethoven and Carl Off. His other obsession is one Sherlock Holmes, the nineteenth-century investigator whose deerstalker hat and the meerschaum pipe never seems to go out of fashion.

One evening at a party at his house, while discussing and teasing others over clues and clusters that make a detective story great, Mitra smells a conspiracy against him and identifies a potential murderer in each one of his three friends and his wife with logical, even if implausible reasons as to why they would want to get rid of him and how. 

And thus begins Mitra’s Holmesian descent into his own life and that of those close to him to uncover what he considers is a cold-blooded and considered attempt at murder. The end is revelatory. 

Funny, dramatic and powerfully engaging, 221B Baker Street seeks to uncover a crime with clues and logic from the most famous literary crimes in history. And the results are truly rewarding. Those who salivate at detective classics will find enough solidarity in this play. Even those who have read classic crime stories but are not obsessed with them will find this play clever enough for a revisit. Of course, it’s not faultless and few of the deliberations seem forced. But they are minor. what is most important is that after a long time, the Bengali stage sees a play that is sophisticated without being specious and engaging without being bombastic and consistently entertains with good support from the high production values. 

The play is held together by Debshankar Halder in what is another pivotal role in this amazing actor’s increasingly wide-ranging oeuvre. He is aptly supported by Surajit Bandopadhyay. The rest of the cast passes muster except Suranjona Bandopadhyay who is weak in the climax. 

The play is audacious given the limited scope of the Bengali stage. It is written and directed by Arindam Mukherjee, whose day job is to own a software company! Mukherjee later explained that he has taken such pain and hardship to produce a play only because he wanted to do a clever, urbane play in Bengali which will also have a high entertainment quotient. His group and he personally had to beg from friends and corporate bodies to put up the play and construct the ingenious and sophisticated two-tiered architecture for the setting. 

Doubtlessly, the Bengali stage needs more people like Mukherjee who are willing to think beyond the quotidian and can bring in the much-needed breath of cosmopolitan air to the Bengali stage.

Review of Bengali play 221B Baker Street