Posts
Your take on Hamlet, The Clown Prince arouses the desire to write something, perhaps (as) gibberish. Actually, as someone related hopelessly to the theatre practices of Kolkata, Rajat Kapoor’s play, after a v-e-r-y long time, offered me some hope to sit through the whole of it. It entertained my senses; but this enjoyment was disturbing, once I came out of the auditorium, or, the temple. Because I couldn’t explain, even to myself, what was in it that overwhelmed me. Was it the intelligent distortion of the story? Playing around with the well-known (at least, to the intended audience) text? Use of language, gibberish and gibber-English that made the audience pay more attention to the language of theatre? And, as a consequence of which, the audience grabbed the few opportunities to understand verbal language? Maybe all these; but there was something more to it. Perhaps it was not there, it was inside us, who formed the audience. I am not talking about the ‘interactive’ part; it was obviously superficial; it could not compel many of us to interact. Then what was it?
I agree with your interpretation of the performance as a series of misinterpretations of the original. But I won’t like to look at ‘the original play only to discover the plat [plot? Play?] in its modern context’. It is not contemporaneous to me, at least not spatially. Kapoor and his clowns harp on the mere existence of the original only as a pre-text to the performance. And does it really ‘see-saw between the reality and illusion’? Here comes the much-misunderstood notion of the absurd.
Absurd is not about illusion and unreal; it explores our realities for meanings through their incongruities. In that sense, this Hamlet may be called absurd. But not for the use of gibberish; spoken language can hamper the theatrical at times, and this play is simply trying to overcome that through this ‘stylization’. I am more for the insignificant, and the everyday in it. If chapliensque is what Kapoor is after, then it seems more appropriate. The tired comedians are trying to enact the tragic, and this attempt itself, being opaque, in a reversal, turns their enactment into a meta-comedy. I believe ‘nobody’ in the audience is identifying with anyone on the stage representing ‘everybody’. On the contrary, everybody shrinks away, looking at their aberrations, excesses. The performance being untranslatable, literally, in a verbal language, seeks mandatory seeing, not looking, at the stage. There being no coherent story, on top of it, makes it impossible for the audience to understand and reduce the performance to a climaxing plot; negates most of our attempts to discern meanings in languages we are accustomed to. Like an Old Comedy, it celebrates, and simultaneously incites a complete critique in us. About the play, and through it, about ourselves. I feel that is one of the reasons why I enjoyed it all, and got disturbed. And thanks to your post, tried to translate these elusive glimpses into a more non-theatrical tongue.
