American writer Richard Armour put it well. He said of Hamlet, the prince of Denmark: “He could never make up his mind, liked to deliver long speeches when no one was listening and poking his sword though the curtains to discourage eavesdropping.”
Armour wrote this in The Twisted Tales of Shakespeare , the Bard retold with dollops of humour and irony, published in 1957. Sixty years on, tragic heroes such as Hamlet and Macbeth are turning on stage into clowns of epic proportion, exuding unexpected humour in the most serious of moments.
These protagonists — hilariously disturbed and unwittingly disturbing — crisscross virtual and real worlds as well as corporate and stately kingdoms. The contexts change, as do the cultural milieus. The lead characters are often turned on their head. What remains constant, however, is the Shakespearean core — the timeless essence of those layered, 400-year-old plays. Take director-actor Rajat Kapoor’s two plays —
Time and again, Shakespearean plays have been disrupted, deconstructed or demystified — in books, films and plays. And each time it’s with a certain sense of novelty that triggers a fresh perspective. While Armour’s classic work veers towards finding comedy in tragedy, intense films such as Vishal Bhardwaj’s
In the adaptation of Hamlet , a bunch of clowns put up a show of the play , at times misinterpreting the text, sometimes adding new meaning to it, and then also messing it up. Macbeth , on the other hand, is a story not just about a murder committed in a grand old castle, but also a contemporary tale of career aspirations, corporate rivalry and poaching.
Kapoor’s plays — recently staged in Kolkata — tap the crest and trough of human emotions. Dressed as clowns, the actors (Vinay Pathak as Hamlet, Ranvir Shorey as Macky B alias Macbeth, and Kalki Koechlin as the pitiable Ophelia) juggle roles — blurring the fine line between tragedy and comedy. They enact a play within a play, often morph into the protagonists, and double as the chorus commenting on the chief protagonist and his foolhardy actions. They are adept at mouthing gibberish and profundity, often sprinkled with black humour.
They connect directly with the audience, breaking the fourth wall — a dramatic device that assumes a wall between the stage and the audience, which the viewers can see through but the actors cannot. They throw funny questions at the spectators. They indulge in asides on the cities in which they perform and effortlessly glide in and out of the main plot, tickling the audience with references to the contemporary world.
Koechlin, Sheena Khalid and Tillotama Shome play the three dark shades of the intriguing Lady Macbeth, and simultaneously morph into the three witches who accost Macky B. As Macky B aspires for a level movement to become the CEO, his ethical fabric is torn to shreds.
Director Kapoor, by his own admission, has been fascinated with clowns of all dispositions — funny, scary, wise and frivolous — ever since he did his first play, C For Clown , in 1999. In that experiment, he realised that he could use clowns to directly get into the heart of a text, as they have the ability to convey the essence of things simply — at once maintaining a distance and getting under the skin of the protagonists. Adapting Shakespeare, however, has been a collaborative act wherein all the actors were involved and given the leeway to improvise, he says. In his Hamlet adaptation, one of the clowns gives away the end at the very beginning: “In the end, everyone dies,” he says, upsetting the other clowns, who fear that he has taken away the suspense from the play by disclosing the end. To that, the clown explains philosophically, “That’s how life is, in the end we will all die.”
Not Shakespeare, though. Last heard, Bhardwaj was looking at Twelfth Night .
Vishnupriya Sengupta is an independent research scholar and works for a professional services firm