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New Delhi: Literature,
clashing cultures and global performance genres merge quaintly on
the Indian stage, riding on legendary 16th century playwright
William Shakespeare's works at the National School of Drama's
annual theatre fest here.
The fortnight-long 15th edition of the Bharat Rangmahotsav will
end Sunday.
The annual showcase of the country's premier drama school turned
its spotlight on "inter-cultural Shakespeare" this time, with a
cache of six productions from across the world.
These are a Hindi version of "Twelfth Night"; an Indian-British
interpretation of "The Tempest"; a Bengali "Macbeth"; a retelling
of "Othello" in Malayalam; a non-verbal Indian-Anerican
Shakespeare collage, "The Knocking Within"; and "Julius
Caesar" in
Assamese by Guwahati's Seagull Theatre group.
Theatre critics said the festival reflected the globalization of a
trend that began nearly 300 years ago in India when the British
rulers brought Shakespeare's plays to these shores to entertain
the "white crew" of the erstwhile East India Company.
Today, Shakespeare has become part of the Indian heritage, a
favourite across class and language divides. His works now spawn
cross-cultural innovations.
The flavour of Shakespeare on the Indian stage is now one of
innovative conceptualism, where the bard's stories are expressed
as ideas.
"Yamadoothu - After the death of Othello" - a bilingual adaptation
of Othello in Malayalam and Hindi by B. Abhimanyu dramatises the
30 minutes between the death of the body and the death of mind in
the case of Othello, his wife Desdemona and the chief antagonist,
Iago. The play runs for 73 minutes.
The production Indianised the performance without digressing from
its original elements. Kalaripayatu - the native martial dance of
Kerala - was used to good effect.
"Before making the performance text, we had a clear cut idea about
death - and the difference between body death and mind death. It
is a scientific thing, the time period when you can see people but
you can't respond. It gives us a certain language to perform. All
things appear dreamy," Thrissur-based Abhimanyu told IANS.
The young director has used spiritual symbols like flowers, milk,
blood and corn stalk to sow the seeds of doubt in Othello's mind
in a simulation of Indian "tantrik"
rituals that are enacted in a stylised theatrical language.
"I trained my actors in Kalaripayatu for 15 days," the director
said.
Explaining one possible reason why Shakespeare may be easily
adapted across the world, Paddy Haytor, founder of French
repertory company Footsbarn Theatre, said: "It is believed that
most of Shakespeare's plays were collated into a compendium of
texts after his death as a result of which the texts were
improvised many times."
Haytor has adapted Shakespeare's "The Tempest" in English,
Malayalam, French and Sanskrit in the outdoor style using
traditional, operatic, western folk and contemporary theatre
elements with a cross-cultural cast of five Malayalee performers.
Last year, London's Globe Theatre had commissioned Mumbai-based
The Company Theatre to produce "Piya Bahuroopiya", an Indian
adaptation of "Twelfth Night" for the "Globe to Globe Shakespeare"
festival to coincide with the London Olympics.
"It renders itself to any language. But we were meant to stay with
the rules of Shakespeare when we staged the play. But it has
changed after we moved out of the Globe Theatre. We have
restructured on the floor, allowing it to grow organically,"
director Atul Kumar told IANS.
The adapted "Twelfth Night" does not have a specific script.
"We read the original Shakespeare and threw it out of the window.
We all knew what the essentials of the play were - and then we
started exploring the play in our way," Kumar said.
The provincial roots of the cast - drawn from Punjab, Madhya
Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan - brought in traditional
flavours and styles, with a folk musical score.
Kumar has played King Lear in "Nothing Like Lear", an adaptation
in gibberish and Hamlet in "The Clown Prince" in English and
gibberish, directed by Rajat Kapoor.
The journey of Shakespeare on the Indian stage has been one of
improvisation by adopting the playwright as an Indian icon, says
former Delhi University professor Vikram Chopra, the author of a
treatise, "Shakespeare: The Indian Icon".
Chopra, the founder secretary of the Shakespeare Society of India
in the capital, says playwright Bhartendu Harish Chandra
translated "Merchant of Venice" on an Indian canvas in Maharashtra
in the early 19th century.
"In Bengal, Girish Ghose translated "Macbeth" to Bengali. It
starred Tinkari, an actress from the red light area of Kolkata as
Lady Macbeth and was first staged at the Minerva Theatre in 1893,"
Chopra recalled.
The National School of Drama has re-invented Shakespeare in the
Indian context. Two of the most memorable productions were a 1965
rendition of "King Lear" starring Om Shiv Puri and a 1989
production directed by Amal Allana in a Rajasthani milieu.
Numerous adapations have appeared on stage in the last 100 years.
Chopra, however, credits the popularity of Shakespeare to Geoffrey
Kendal's "Shakespearewallah", a travelling theatre company that
staged Shakespeare's plays across the country.
James Shapiro, a well-known Shakespeare scholar from the US says:
"Shakespeare is the only playwright in the English-speaking world
whom no one has to pay for staging plays. Shakespeare is for
everybody....".
(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)
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