Returning to what they do effortlessly on stage—playing off each other, just the two of them, like they did in Dear Liar—Naseeruddin and Ratna Pathak Shah enjoy a national run with Aleksei Arbuzov’s Old World (sic: see below), produced by Motley in English and presented in Kolkata by Bengal Club at Birla Sabhagar. About the friendship that develops between two lonesome senior citizens, the gentle drama has a heady history in our city, going back to Geoffrey and Laura Kendal’s tour in 1984, followed by two memorable Indianizations directed by Asit Mukhopadhyay in the 1990s, Takhan Bikel (adapted by Mohit Chattopadhyaya, no less) and Shām bhi thi Dhuyān Dhuyān, in Bengali and Hindi respectively. Rangroop revived Takhan Bikel recently under Sima Mukherjee’s direction. In between, the late Dinesh Thakur’s Hindi version, Ham Dono, visited more than once.
If I may digress further to give readers the background, Old-World has an interesting position in its home country. When Arbuzov, perhaps the most-performed Soviet playwright of his generation outside Russia, wrote it in 1975, he was himself in his sixties, the age of his two characters. Already popular in the USSR, he had stymied the establishment by not conforming to Communist dogma on theatre. Old-World, among his last works, continued his style of “new lyricism” and contained absolutely no political content. This facilitated its ready acceptance in the West, though many cynics flayed its “old-world”, near-romantic sentimentalism.
The Russian title, literally meaning “Old-fashioned Comedy”, tells yet another story. Anyone can deduce that Arbuzov wanted viewers to take it comedically, which explains its several twists at the end. But Ariadne Nicolaeff dropped the noun in her English translation. “Old-fashioned” also says a lot, indicating that Arbuzov consciously harked back to a pre-Revolutionary, possibly Chekhovian, atmospheric mood. Nicolaeff copied this adjective by translating it as Old-World with a hyphen. But Motley, like many Western companies, deleted the punctuation from their main publicity material. By doing so, it signifies an elderly folks’ world—not the original aim at all.
I have laboured to make this point simply because I obsess about the carelessness with which people nowadays dispose of the neglected punctuation marks that can mean so much. However, Motley Indianize the script fluently. Significantly, they convert the couple into minorities: Dr Rashid Qureshi and Xenobia (spelt with an eccentric X suiting her personality), a Parsi lady. The sanatorium in Riga becomes Ranikhet; Arbuzov’s references to World War II turn into the Indo-Pakistan war over Bangladesh; and Xenobia’s son went missing in the 1992 communal riots. Thus, both characters lost loved ones to traumatic ethnic conflicts, introducing a relevant social comment.
Arghya Lahiri doesn’t have to do much by way of direction, for the Shahs virtually direct themselves. Ratna has a felicitous field day with Xenobia’s fibbing and malapropisms (“catastrophobic” the finest of them). Lahiri could edit the concluding plot somersaults, which do seem too old-fashioned today (the American publisher retitled Nicolaeff’s translation as Do You Turn Somersaults?, a line from the dialogue but no doubt punning on Xenobia’s peripatetic reversals). Dhanendra Kawade’s set of a four-sided hut upstage right neatly swivels to reveal different facades depending on the scene. And Kaizad Gherda’s soundtrack (including Pushan Kripalani’s original “Secret Smile”) is apt, though it can’t beat Asit Mukhopadhyay’s brainwave of Wham!’s “Careless Whisper”.
31 July 2024