Son of Shakespeare-Wallah
Weekend Telegraph,
30th March 1991
The early
performances didn’t seem to be going down too well. The audiences were
apparently indifferent to the Bard. But as the English Shakespeare Company
proceeded with its tour, it learned that the Indians were immersed in his works
– they just had an unusual way of showing their appreciation. Louise Nicholson
watched from the wings.
Up on the stage of the Kamini Auditorium in New Delhi, the thoroughly contemptible Coriolanus, dressed in a drab grey suit, comes forward through bare props and harsh lighting suggestive of some economically deprived Eastern European country. Grabbing the microphone, he bellows into it, damning the imagined populus who have given him the highest position in the land. Actors sitting in the audience get up, shout and jeer – furious at the ingratitude of the man they have raises to such heights. Coriolanus is exiled. In the stifling, airless theatre, it is hot work for Michael Pennington and his English Shakespeare Company, many thousands of miles from home.
Down in the dark below, the audience seem oblivious
of their efforts. Many had arrived late, including a man with long, matted hair
who shuffles noisily to his seat, his grubby, baggy trousers given dignity by
an exotic red-and-blue striped shawl draped over one shoulder.
There was a constant buzz of chatter. A manicured
woman in the front row, swathed in a tomato-red silk sari with gold brocade
edging, the button-sized diamonds in her ears and nose confirming her status,
discussed developments in the Gulf war with her handsome escort.
A tall Sikh in an untidy turban got up in
mid-speech, went out, came back and sat down in a different seat, right in
front of a small, very serious-looking man in a dark suit who was making notes.
Other people made similar moves, until it seemed a quarter of the audience was
playing a mysterious, slow motion game of musical chairs.
In the lobby, a heated argument broke out,
competing with the actors for attention. Then came the interval, when the
political gossip that is the life-blood of Delhi filled the air, and hot
vegetable savouries did a roaring trade. After it, a number of seats were
empty. And at the end, those who had stayed the course to see Coriolanus die
gave scant applause before scuttling out.
For three weeks, all the Indian audiences behaved
like this. In Britain, the actors would have been thoroughly fed up. The first
night in Bombay they were, until a local came backstage and burst out
enthusiastically: “Look how many stayed to the end! And they even applauded!
You’re a terrific success!” By the time they reached Delhi, a rather calmer
Pennington could philosophise: “The probably thought ‘OK, so Coriolanus has
been exiled, that’s it’ and went off to the movies.”
This coolness and apparent lack of interest on the
part of Indian audiences has nothing to do with a rejection of Imperialistic
values. Quite the reverse. It belies an Indian love of Shakespeare which
borders on possessive passion. But, just as it is perfectly normal for an
Indian to go to two or three hours of an all-night music recital, so it is
perfectly acceptable to drop in to an act or two of Shakespeare.
Imagine this. In the tiny territory of Mizoram in
northeastern India, bordered by Bangladesh and Burma, teenagers stroll down the
streets chanting not lines from the popular Hindi movies of Bombay but the
speeches of the Prince of Denmark. Redemption Theatricals’ production of
‘Hamlet’ played in the local Hizo language has been a runaway success for five
years. And such was its instant popularity that the entrepreneurial local
amateur actors obtained 3,000 cassette tapes – a feat in itself – squeezed the
play down to 45 minutes, and in less than a fortnight sold all recordings on
the streets.
Or this – for it is in translation that some of
India’s most vibrant Shakespeare theatre can be found today. Delhi director
Amal Allana has just produced ‘King Lear’ in a new Hindustani translation,
setting it among the proud Rajput princes of Rajasthan. “The subject – three
women fighting for land heritance – is totally suitable,” she says. “So are the
high-powered curses Lear throws at his daughter, the youngest daughter being
misunderstood, and the theme of exile. So it’s all highly accessible to the
Indian mind. All these emotions are in our ‘Mahabharata’.”
Such sensitivity to the appropriateness of
Shakespeare’s plots is nothing new: in the ‘70s, the great Bengali
actor-director Utpal Dutt took a political line and staged ‘Macbeth’ during
Indira Gandhi’s repressive emergency. “We knew,” he said later, “that we
couldn’t find a better play against autocracy.” The Calcuttans, India’s
cultural elite, got the point loud and clear; it passed over the heads of the
Delhi politicians.
Clearly, far from having Shakespeare thrust upon
them, the Indians can’t get enough of it. When the British Council asked India
what theatre they would like brought out from Britain, the immediate cry was
for “Shakespeare, performed by your best troupe”. Michael Bogdanov and Michael
Pennington’s English Shakespeare Company were invited.
They slotted in four weeks in India between the
Europe and Australia fixtures of their six-month world tour, bringing
‘Coriolanus’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’ to Bombay, Bangalore, Delhi and Calcutta
audiences. Even for a company which took ‘The Wars of the Roses’ on the road in
Britain and internationally for two years, India was to be a challenge, off-stage
and on.
Practical organisation is something Indians
themselves acknowledge to be a frustrating obstacle course. For David Bownes,
the company manager, steering a troupe of 40 actors and technicians plus the
stage equipment around India has been his greatest test to date. “Touring
anywhere else in the world is a nightmare,” he said, smiling calmly just after
two buses failed to turn up to transfer the company to the theatre and he
rounded up a dozen taxis from all the dusty streets. “In India it is a triple
nightmare.”
Kevin Fitz-Simons, in charge of lighting, summed up
India as “a lack of plugs and sockets; they just shrove two wires into a socket
here”. Dashing between theatre and hotel in the back of an auto-rickshaw, a
lethally dangerous form of public transport, he recalled how one night a
generator packed up before the show. Someone trying to borrow some of the
diesel had let the air in.
With a string of horror stories from previous visiting
companies, it was decided to abandon scenery and all but the most essential
props for the India part of the tour. But those essential props included a
crate of guns and pistols used in ‘Coriolanus’, which is set in present-day
Eastern Europe. In the current political climate, it seemed to make little
difference to the customs at Bombay that the weapons were replicas and could
fire only blanks. To get them through the red tape took a non-stop 24 hours and
included the close perusal of letters from Indian ministers, the presence of
British Council representatives, and 13 signatures, each from a different
person in a different office. One official silently and slowly finished her
lunch before signing.
India successfully thwarted attempts to move even the
pared-down stage equipment. An overnight announcement that the internal planes,
into which the freight had been carefully designed to fit exactly, were to
change immediately for a size smaller because of fuel shortages meant that one
or two larger props had to stay in Bombay. It was then that the Bangalore
carpenters and craftsmen showed what they could do. As one amazed actor
reported: “Using tools you see only in a medieval history museum, they simply
set to, and in two days made everything we couldn’t bring from Bombay – the
massive shearing platform for ‘The Winter’s Tale’, the sheep pen, tables,
everything.”
Replacing the giant Coriolanus head vital to the
play was less successful. The original was made of fibreglass. The Bangalore
sculpture students used chicken wire and plaster of Paris. The result was
magnificent but, because the plaster was still wet, extremely heavy. Just as it
was being delivered into the theatre, it imploded. The students wept, but the
show went on.
The actors have shared the boards with a variety of
wildlife. Bats were hanging from the grid of one, and squeaked throughout the
lightning storm of ‘The Winter’s Tale’; chipmunks scampered along an air vent;
a family of rats living in a piece of old scenery played hide-and-seek during
shows; and a lizard fell from the flies on to the stage made a dazed bid for
stardom, then scuttled off. The audience took no notice; the British cast were
totally phased. “It’s not something that happens in Nottingham,” said on actor.
“But then nothing is the same in India,” added June
Watson, who plays Volumnia, Coriolanus’s mother, rousing herself from a snooze
between matinee and evening performances, while the rest of the cast played
cards or read Anita Desai and V.S. Naipaul novels. “I share a dressing room
with a rat, share a stage with a lizard, ride an elephant, walk along a street
with a monkey, and watch a man levitate.” Pausing to yawn, she went on
dreamily: “I can’t get on with things today because I went to the Taj Mahal
yesterday. I saw it, burst into tears, and didn’t want to leave it.”
Off-stage noises have been disconcerting, too.
Having been aggressively interrogated by a Bombay journalist who accused
Bogdanov and Pennington of making the Coriolanus enemy army fundamentalist
Moslems (which was untrue), hearts missed a beat in Bangalore when,
mid-performance, thunderous shouting in the streets outside grew nearer and
nearer. Far from being a riot, it turned out to be a wedding procession.
The Bombay customs, the bats and the Taj Mahal have
churned up the company’s emotions. But it is the audience which, after the
initial surprise, have really impressed them.
To begin with, they know their Shakespeare, and in
a way which is typical of this vast, inordinately complex land whose ancient
culture and many empires have survived countless invasions and conquests. India
has never knelt at the foot of a foreign culture. Rather, it has cast an almost
nonchalant eye at its string of occupying tax-gathers, selecting from each – be
he Turk, Afghan, Persian, Portuguese, French, Danish or British – certain
cultural element which it absorbs, digests and then uses to create something
new and dynamic.
So with William Shakespeare. Introduced quite
widely last century, when the homesick British played it in their clubs and
theatres, two strands of Shakespeare soon developed. While the rising Indian
middle class learnt the language of their rulers, the Bard became part of the
Indian school curriculum designed and examined in far-flung England.
At the same time, the swelling national movement
encouraged translations into some of India’s plethora of languages. ‘The
Merchant of Venice’ went into Bengali in 1853, ‘Hamlet’ into Marathi’ in 1862,
while ‘A Comedy of Errors’ crossed new territory into Gujarati in 1865,
Sanskrit in 1877 and Hindi two years later. When the Rabindranath Tagore’s
brother, Jyotirindranath, made a fine Bengali translation of ‘Julius Caesar’ in
1907, it was considered a great tribute to Shakespeare. Translation continues
today, and at a Shakespeare festival held in Delhi two years ago, some 250 made
over the last century were catalogued, though most of them have never been
performed.
In independent India, both strands – the English
and the usually shortened and simplified translations – live in conflict.
Purists keep to the English. In Delhi, Professor Rupen Desai edits the
well-read Shakespeare journal “Hamlet” and is a specialist on ‘The Winter’s
Tale’, while the Shakespeare Society of St Stephens College still produces its
annual play, once using the beautiful Lodi Gardens as the theatre for ‘A
Midsummer Night’s Dream’. In Calcutta, an English graduate recalls with dreamy
pleasure spending two years going through the first two acts of ‘Macbeth’: “I
had a superb professor, totally methodical. We started at the beginning, with
‘Enter three witches’ and he gave three lectures on just that. It was
captivating. I remember it all.”
Roshan Seth, who played Nehru in Richard
Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi’, belongs to the purist set. Leaving the ESC’s ‘Coriolanus’
performance, he was almost ecstatic. “There! Three and a half hours and I
wasn’t bored for a second. The political plot is perfect, utterly perfect for
India”.
At India’s elite schools – although no longer in
the capital’s progressive institutions – pupils follow tradition, starting with
‘The Merchant of Venice’. It was to past pupils of these schools that India’s
most famous travelling theatre played, the Kendal family’s Shakespeareana
(immortalised in the Merchant-Ivory film ‘Shakespeare-Wallah). Geoffrey and his
two daughters, Jennifer and Felicity trundled round India on their annual
Shakespeare tour, to be laughed at with a mixture of affection and respect.
So it is no surprise that the actors have come to
enjoy and respect their noisy, frank and keen houses. The free approach of the
audience “Keeps us on our toes, making us realise there’s someone out there.
The whole attitude is different, and the show benefits.” As well as the formal
audience, there are usually a dozen without tickets, necks craned to catch
every drop of the action.
Audience recognition of Shakespeare’s puns and
wordplay has impressed the whole troupe. “They get it much faster than a
British audience,” observed Karen Ardiff, on her first ESC tour, “and we get
the feeling they understand it better than us. It’s tremendously stimulating.”
Lyn Farleigh, who plays Hermione in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, agrees. With half her
mind in a projected train trip to Varanasi, she added: “I was waiting in the
foyer to do an entrance and people came over to discuss the part. It is
marvellous.”
“Noisily attentive” is how Michael Pennington sums
up what his whole company agrees to be “some of our classiest audience yet”. In
Bangalore, an academic bounced up to him after the show and asked about Olivier’s
performance of Coriolanus in 1956 at Stratford.
“He wanted to know if Olivier had used a certain
rubato effect and changed the beat of two specific speeches in the dying
moments of Coriolanus. In vain did I try to tell them that I was only 12 years
old then and, although I had seen the production, performances change from day
to day.” The man’s enthusiasm and information were overwhelming. Later, he
brought Pennington a little carved shrine of Ganesh, the Hindu god of learning
and prosperity, “so all obstacles will be out of my way and I’ll make lots of
money”.
To tour a theatre group in India, the god’s bounty
in both criteria would be useful. The ESC wants to return there, next time to
some of the smaller cities. There is even talk of reviving the Kendal tradition
and taking an eight-man company round in a Land Rover. Mizoram will doubtless
be on their itinerary.