The high costs of bringing an out-of-town proscenium production here have scuttled our once-regular exposure to such theatre. In its place, we get more barebones solo or duo performers, Mumbai and Bengaluru offering the latest imports. Their content and portability facilitated extra gigs in schools and universities, temporarily filling the vacuum in our educational theatre. Their use of audience participation made enjoyable interaction possible too.
We all know that theatre is therapeutic, but proactive rather than after-the-fact counselling occurs rarely. Duncan Macmillan’s internationally acclaimed Every Brilliant Thing, effectively Indianized by QTP (Mumbai), falls under this latter small umbrella and has notched up a hundred shows, this month inaugurating the Urban Theatre Project’s intimate space on Kabir Road. Macmillan’s 2013 play (co-scripted with Jonny Donahoe, his actor) features one man narrating the story of his mother’s suicide after several previous attempts. He begins as a boy, taken from school by his father to visit her in hospital following a failed attempt. The experience makes him start a list of wonderful things to live for, which he continues later in his own life. Innovatively, he coaxes viewers to enact the other characters.
Quasar Thakore Padamsee directs Vivek Madan in the role, an amiable man-next-door type who facilely essays the one-hour-plus text without a hiccup and faces no obstacles in persuading the spectators he selects. Some of this impromptu cast at the first show in UTP created winsome episodes, like the lady who agreed to voice his school counsellor, and the young woman who willingly became his girlfriend, even whipping out a ring to propose to him. The itemized numbers of brilliant things on paper scraps tended to drag the pace both towards the beginning and end, but as a novel way to counter suicidal depression with a discussion afterwards led by a mental-health expert, everything was worth it.
Bangalore Little Theatre’s Robi’s Garden (2011) visited Kolkata at last at Kolkata Centre for Creativity in BLT’s compact “Courtyard Theatre” version, which basically means storytelling at a found venue. Put together as a tribute to Tagore by senior director Vijay Padaki, it comprises excerpts from Tagore’s writings for or about children and aims primarily at an audience of kids, a few of them called up to join the two storytellers, Padaki and Minti Jain. Coincidentally, Tagore’s granddaughter Nandini, to whom he had addressed many of these pieces, used to live in Bengaluru as of 2012.
The performance felt slightly rusty on cues, but otherwise engaged all, many of whom did not seem to know the original Bengali sources. Padaki includes the very relevant satirical skit “Ārya o Anārya” from Hāsyakautuk, where a proud “Aryan” extols Aryan science as superior to the European variety.
Since the script is in English, my concern as a translator lies with its fidelity. For example, the passage on tigers from Shé includes significant mistranslations. Tagore’s tall tale about Viswakarma’s creation of humans does not refer at all to a dog which, Padaki relates, requested Viswakarma for a companion. Elsewhere, Tagore mentions foxes (khyānk-sheyāl) and jackals (sheyāl), but the translator or director has changed them to hyenas. We must not mislead our children about nature, so important to Tagore. Padaki should have asked a competent Bengali to vet his English text.
[22 July 2024]