Much of the world is Shakespeare’s stage

Paradox of Paradis

e by

Bachchoo

The 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, St. George’s Day, a celebration of the Turkish fellow who killed dragons and the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death were commemorated last week in Britain. The Queen’s reign, the longest in British history will continue to be celebrated throughout the coming year with TV series, biographies and hundreds of articles on the doings and significance of the monarchy.

My only humble offering to these celebrations was a TV interview for a documentary about other female monarchs of England. It naturally featured Queen Victoria and they asked me questions about her attitude to Empire and about her Indian servant and “secretary” of later years, Abdul Karim.

My contribution so far to the Shakespeare effort is a commission to write an adaptation of one of his plays for the Indian and Bangladeshi stage. It’s work in progress.

Every writer for the last 400 years is at the least aware of Shakespeare’s works, stories, poetry, approach to drama and in very many cases obsessed with his output. I must confess that I have written one novel, three stage monologues for female actors and two screenplays which draw on the Bard’s work. The novel was published in England and in Europe and the monologues performed in several theatres and countries — though not yet in India. The screenplays, one an adaptation to Bollywood of King Lear and the other an “Indian” comedy based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are yet to be adopted, shot and screened (all practical and potentially financed offers welcome!)

My school in Pune used to, every year throughout my short and happy time there, stage plays by the Shakespearana Company which toured India, Asia and Australia in tattered buses, performing in schools, colleges, clubs and wherever. It was my first acquaintance with his work and though I was eight years old when I first saw them perform, the memory remains.

The company was run by Geoffrey Kendal and his family, later joined by Shashi Kapoor who married Kendal’s elder daughter Jennifer.

My first memory of their performances is of The Merchant of Venice. I was in the fifth standard and we juniors were accommodated squat-legged on the floor of the school hall.

The maroon curtains of the stage were yet to reveal their mysteries when a young girl appeared in front of them and strolling from one side of the stage to the other strummed a stringed instrument and sang Green Sleeves. A murmur arose in the hall. Girls that age may have performed as jugglers on the streets but our sisters and cousins would never be allowed to perform in this way. It would be considered shameless.

I suppose I absorbed the fact then or soon after, that actors lived in a dimension in which the conventions of shame were suspended. That they spent their lives pretending to be someone else.

It was much later in life that I became aware that the girl who sang Alas my love you do me wrong in melancholy tones, strutting before those curtains, must have been Felicity Kendal who went on to become a world-renowned actor.

But, as the actress didn’t say: “Enough about me!” If all the world’s a stage, a substantial area of it is a Shakespearean one. Every language has translations of his plays and the Indian stage and films have adapted very many of them to Indian settings using contemporary Indian characters. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool from Macbeth comes easily to mind and Vishal went on very successfully to adapt Othello and Hamlet. His are recent offerings. The history of Indian cinema is replete with adaptations.

I have attended and even spoken at (sorry, back to me but not significantly!) several seminars which posed the question: why does Shakespeare continue to be popular today. There are clichéd answers about the universality of his characters etc. A parallel question is why do Shakespeare’s themes, plots and characters lend themselves to Indian adaptations Is it because India is today, albeit in very different and advanced historical circumstances, undergoing the transition from a feudal settlement to a capitalist one Just as Elizabethan England was in Shakespeare’s time, shaking up old values and pieties and coming to terms with new ways of thinking and feeling

In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare pits Shylock against Antonio and the female heroine Portia turns the plot around. Though Shakespeare would not have thought of it in these terms, Shylock represents usurer’s capital and Antonio represents merchant capital. Portia represents the rise of feminine authority which, of course, with Queen Elizabeth I was dominant in Shakespeare’s time.

Now think of a scenario from the late 19th or early 20th century in India. Let’s say merchant capital is represented by a Parsi who equips the British opium trade to China and has ships, just as Antonio does, which deliver great dividends. Then there’s the village money-lender who accumulates enough wealth for his heirs to go into manufacturing. Does the characterisation suggest any names from India’s nascent capitalist stage Throw in the growing authority and influence of women in the Nationalist Movement, and in various possible combinations we have the lineaments of a close Shakespeare adaptation.

My Pakistani friends have adapted a Shakespearean problem play in a scene-by-scene and speech-by-speech translation into Urdu. I am yet to see the finished product but it has, before it reaches the screens, received enthusiastic endorsements from financiers and distributors. In the UK, Tara Arts a company which has pioneered “Indian” theatre is touring its version of Macbeth. The spoken dialogue is word for word, with some editing, Shakespeare’s play; the costumes are Indian with turbans and saris and the sets are suggestively oriental. The audience is invited to deduce who the characters are and accept the plausibility of the action. It by-and-large works!