Stagestruck

Stagestruck

Hamlet is an issue that theatre directors have loved to deplore and exploit time and again. So much so that there's an old English joke about an actor who is hired to play the gravedigger in Hamlet. "What's is it about?" his wife asks. "It's about a gravedigger who meets a prince," he says, in a desperate attempt to assert his worth before his wife. Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is somewhat on those lines -- a modern tour de force, in which the action in Hamlet is viewed through the eyes of two of the marginal characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's college friends, who accompany him on his trip to England. And it sure is a fascinating play. We get to use our knowledge of Hamlet to piece together the half-glimpsed, incomplete actions of the major players, whose famous scenes we see a line or a moment of, at a time. Sounds difficult? Well, then the production we're be talking about is not for you. On the other hand, it might just turn out tobe a huge risk for Company Theatre's Atul Kumar, the actor in Rajat Kapoor's C For Clowns, and here, the director.

"This play has always fascinated me. It's the tragi-comic element of two `normal' individuals caught in the macabre world of the palace of Denmark, somewhat reminiscent of the tramps in Beckett's Waiting For Godot, says Atul Kumar. And hence two languages, a part of the experimentation, which also includes evil figures wearing weird costumes, smeared with black liquids, strutting on stilts across the stage -- juxtaposing the world of the master as opposed to the petty world of the slaves. "The set adds to it," the director says, "it's on a grand scale, with a white plastic sheaf and a massive ship in one of the scenes." So if you have ever wondered what minor characters in great plays do between appearances on stage, you'll love Rosencrantz and...

As the sinister events of Hamlet swirl around them, Rose and Guil try desperately to discover the reason why they've been summoned to the Danish court. With Sheeba Chadda, Paresh Mokashi and Rajiv Kumar in the lead roles, the rehearsal suggests an audacity in the way Stoppard's characters lurked in the wings of Shakespeare's most perplexing tragedy, inflating their own importance. The tension between what was centrestage in the main play and what was offstage will be the subject of the performance evening.

While Kumar admits that the play has a strong contemporary element that will be obvious to the discerning audience, it is interesting that Stoppard himself only offered cryptic responses to questions about the meaning of the play when it was first produced in 1966: "The play does not reveal any profound theories or insights on a conscious level, but one is a victim and beneficiary of one's subconscious all the time and obviously, one is making choices all the time. It's difficult for me to endorse or discourage particular theories. I personally think that anybody's set of ideas which grows out of the play has its own validity.... It's a play chiefly calculated to entertain a roomful of people," he equivocally maintained.

Stoppard was known to be a highly private artist. As one of his critics, Michael Berry, later commented, "Stoppard is extremely difficult to paraphrase, and his plots often defy easy summary," which apparently applies to nearly all his plays -- Arcadia, Enter a Free Man, Jumpers, Indian Ink -- and screenplays, including the Oscar-winning Shakespeare In Love, The Human Factor, Empire of The Sun and the screen version of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead.

Coming back to the desi version, it is just another feather on the esoteric cap of the Company Theatre that has productions like C For Clowns, Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs, Moliere's Sganarelle and The Flying Doctor, Paresh Mokashi's Marathi play, Sangeet Debuchya Muli, and more recently, the concept of home theatre (small performances in select drawing rooms of Mumbai for an audience of 30-35 invitees) to its credit. All to familiarise Mumbai with a taste of the classics served on an innovative platter. It's for the audience to see and accept. And just before the curtain goes up on Rosencrantz and..., the team seems more than optimistic: "Mumbai has responded very well to our kind of theatre. People here people go to the auditorium to see what is on stage. There is a strong theatre-going culture, so you get to reach out to a lot of people."

This one sure promises to be worthy of a quality weekend evening. A pity two among us (Rose and Guil) are bogged down to the outskirts of a great tragedy and a pleasure that one gets to watch.