Jashn-e-Rang opened with plenty of sound and fury, two consecutive evenings featuring Hindi productions of a famous Marathi reworking of King Lear and an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust.
V. V. Shirwadkar’s Nat-Samrat has always won standing ovations since Shreeram Lagoo created the titular role in 1970, and Ekrang (Bhopal) proved no exception to the rule. It is a dream of virtuosity for the leading man, and Alok Chatterjee gave everything in his armoury to the retired hero Belwalkar’s part, from resounding Shakespearean speeches to emotional domestic dialogue to mad destitution near the end. Unlike most star vehicles that revolve entirely round the lead, here the rest of the cast under Jayanth Deshmukh’s direction provided good support, given their limited scope.
But Nat-Samrat is no tragedy, simply melodrama of the best order set in typical Indian family nastiness. Goneril and Regan transform into a son whose wife bans her father-in-law from playing with their child, and a daughter who accuses her father of stealing money. Cordelia becomes Belwalkar’s loving, self-sacrificing spouse who never leaves his side – removing Lear’s arrogant isolation. For me, Akshara Agrawal as the spontaneous little granddaughter (who has no precedent in Lear) shone as the real star. In place of the kingdom, Belwalkar reigned over the stage, allowing for lots of self-pitying nostalgia about the glory days of theatre. Shockingly, however, Deshmukh retained racist and sexist lines that have no place today: Belwalkar refers to all ethnicities east of India as having identical looks, and how husbands like voyaging ships return to harbour – their wives.
People’s Theatre Group (Delhi) compressed Goethe’s sprawling two-part magnum opus into 90 minutes, keeping only Faust, Mephistopheles, Margaret and Wagner from the original dramatis personae of hundreds, and introducing such new characters as superhuman counterparts Lucifer and Anahita, and Faust’s narcissistic mirror, Espejo. Dramatist-director Niloy Roy employs a laboured postmodernist style where words play second fiddle to images, the strongest being Faust (Prabir Mukherjee) eating up newsprint symbolizing his consumption of knowledge and Margaret (Ambalika Raha) making love to a mannequin symbolizing life of the senses. But like most directors of Faust, Roy concludes by consigning Faust to eternal death, ignoring Goethe’s macrocosmic Part 2 that apotheosizes him.
(From The Times of India, 22 November 2019)