Thanks to Sayak’s golden jubilee festival, I got a ringside view of one of Bengali theatre’s present blockbusters, Swapna-sandhani’s Hamlet. Unlike most directors today, Koushik Sen approaches it with singular reverence to the Shakespearean text in a near-complete (alas, poor Fortinbras, always chopped at the tail) prose translation by Chaiti Mitra, consequently occupying the stage for nearly three hours, which Bengali groups try to avoid for fear of testing the audience’s attention span. Unhappily, a solo dancer prefacing the show made a mockery of the cardinal principles of his art by holding up placards explicitly alluding to current affairs: he should know that dance works through subtlety.
Sen’s confidence with the text goes to the extent of having some of the original lines delivered in English, beginning his production with Hamlet’s advice to the Players, “Speak the speech … trippingly on the tongue” or, no surprise, “To be or not to be” in its rightful place, and others. But then his long obsession with jokers and masks gets the better of him, inserting Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” accompanied by masked dancers, all quite superfluous.
Hamlet’s emergence as an embryo does shake us up, though Riddhi Sen’s predilection throughout for various forms of underwear in his role goes back all the way to Joseph Papp’s infamous “Naked” Hamlet. Decidedly a youthful and less brooding or philosophical character, Riddhi carves his own interpretive niche, snapping his fingers as a mannerism when perfectly sane, reading Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, and otherwise capering about pretending madness “north-northwest” in Shakespeare’s words.
Koushik’s novel touch lies in the Ghost, which I think I can safely reveal 18 months after opening night. In the age of landlines we often suffered phones going dead, but the dead going into phones is something my limited knowledge hasn’t heard of. Whenever Hamlet receives a call (photo), disembodied sounds emanate, while he, Gertrude, even the guards voice his father’s lines, as if the Ghost has possessed them. I promise never to surrender my landline now, in hopes of important communications from beyond. Jokes apart, I learnt from an interview that Koushik visualized it in terms of lost Communist ideals—telephonic messages from the departed telling the revolutionary prince what went wrong and what he should do—but if I hadn’t seen the clip I would not have guessed this reading. Good that it did not turn overt.
Neither Claudius (Koushik) nor Gertrude (Reshmi Sen) gives away much of their possible motivations, cloaking themselves in relative ambiguity, except that he seems genuinely concerned about her excessive drinking. In a directorial decision that I don’t agree with, they come down to the front row of the auditorium to watch the Mousetrap, which obscures their telltale facial reactions from our sight.
Polonius becoming Poloniya does not bother me one bit, actually reminding me of my own transforming Antonio into Antonia and casting Sohini Sengupta as Shylock, which the purist critic Dharani Ghosh titled a “Scandal in Venice” in his review. But the thespian find of the evening was Surangama Bandyopadhyay, whose Ophelia genuinely evokes frailty in the sense of vulnerability descending into tragic insanity.
I must comment on the eclectic range of songs. Hamlet and Ophelia’s duetting live on Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero” made me sit up, along with appropriate Rabindrasangit. The Band’s “Ophelia” rocking at her graveside sounded even more unusual, but brought too much burlesque into the Hamlet-Laertes fight. The theatrical use of the Bengali version of the leftist anthem “L’Internationale”, however, has grown stale.
Another cliché for Swapna-sandhani are the camouflage fatigues: so many of their plays have utilized them that we can predict them as garb for all their supernumerary soldiers. Of course, I have no issue with modern dress, a time-honoured tradition for Shakespeare dating back exactly 100 years to Barry Jackson. But I did expect more from the set—a massive skull centrestage with an overhanging crown of toys and table-fan parts (the symbolism beats me) that the cast hardly engaged with, apart from a brief token sequence atop the skull.
This is the right place to note Alaap’s Julius Caesar 2.0, an “adventure” entirely in English by a Bengali group, which fails because, barring Rup Deb (Mark Antony), nobody pronounces English correctly. Horrors abound worse than Calpurnia’s omens: among them, two renderings of Ides, ship=sheep, and mischievious rearing its Indian head. One only has to compare Riddhi’s perfect enunciation to understand the difference. And masks yet again, this time from V for Vendetta! Et tu, Brute?
Just as crucial, classics demand dramaturgical advice that director Rudrarup Mukhopadhyay cannot provide; by way of a glaring example, why does a cross appear here, 70-odd years before the Crucifixion? The dramaturg would also have insisted they qualify their claim about being the first Bengali group to attempt a full Shakespeare in English. In 1854, the Jorasanko Natyashala performed the same play (equally badly, if we believe the reports), and that too as a ticketed show.
13 December 2023