Bismaykar Shobkichu/Every Brilliant Thing (2021)
Bismaykar Shobkichu – heartwarmingly funny and stunningly poignant – is a loving narrative tracing the life of an only child to a young mother with clinical depression, told through deeply organic sensitivity, balanced with a charming contemporary edge.
When her mother attempts to take her own life, the child – aged just 7 – sets out to make a list, in her innocent urgency, of every brilliant thing in the world. Thereby, she hopes to remind her mother, why life is worth living.
Although the list fails to save her mother’s life in the end, it becomes a glaring mirror of the pitfalls and epic highs of her own life. We watch her grow, along with the list, through stages of her life: school, university, first love, marriage, separation, and eventually, her mother’s death.
Yet the story is of tremendous effort and its beauty is in its underlying drive that refuses to surrender to darkness, whispering a simple, radical message: as long as we’re alive, anything is possible. Therefore, the act of choosing life – again and again – is its own quiet revolution.
Told in unadorned, almost conversational language, Bismaykar Shobkichu reigns in the audience’s own experiences, evoking emotion truthfully, intimately with delicate precision without for once needing to exploit it. It is a performance experience that is unique every single time, fittingly for a story that reminds us of the wonders threading through even the most ordinary days of our lives.
Produced in 2021, Bismaykar Sabkichhu is an interactive performance where one actor weaves the narrative with the collaboration of a number of spectators.