Clown Lear – enigmatic, yet endearing

“Can’t you see, I am trying to cry” is how a theatre starts. It can actually since even before this, we find the character on stage – into some business, looking at the audience as if he fears them. The Brechtian reference of Epic theatre is clichéd but again it seldom fails as long as the mood is not only in the form but carried through in content as well, subsequently. The Company Theatre’s premiere Clown Lear (dir: Rajat Kapoor, actor: Atul Kumar) on the 17^th of December as part of the inaugural show of the 11^th Odeon has been successful in keeping the dynamics of theatre in place. We find a singular character on stage who is Chaplin-sque as par his looks – we immediately relate him to a clown. That’s what he says as well. He is a clown who is asked to play the fool in William Shakespeare’s epic King Lear. Who is Lear, by the way? Is he the clown or the fool in the play itself with whom Lear can probably change hearts? The next one and half hours or so the singlet unfolds himself, juxtaposes different roles, takes up the responsibilities of many and then leaving in nothingness.  Ironically, it waffles the nothingness of ‘our’ living as well.  This is the cradle where the Absurdist theatre of Samuel Beckett mingles so effortlessly. The jibes at the audience, the mocking of them at the face, the slants made are so typically self-referential. The audience is part of a performance, anyone can replace the clown on stage, and doesn’t everyone do so in their personal isolated existences? The inner explorations of a tumultuous mind, the intermingled layer of memory and experience gel with the outward angst of being deprived, of seeking justice.

            Even without the theoretical heaviness theatre wins when it ropes in the audience in its journey. An elite audience, of an urban metropolis, of a third-world country – an audience that is as sure as a humbug! The clown is the tramp – the defeated individual, that philosophical monk who slaps at the face of existentiality and tells us how his daughter, his “little one” actually threw him out of her home bought on his money and loans. How, he loved her daughter, gave her all that he can and now that his little one is no more, he doesn’t want to curse her for what she had done –

“Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so
That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!”

Like the tempest suddenly Lear jumps out of the clown. Or as I said, isn’t Lear the clown himself?

            The entire play is strewn with inter-texts, the blurring of narrative where we can identify with Lear’s story, through references of the daughter’s misuse of love and the forlorn father – the three daughters of Lear merge to a single one of the clown. When the clown says “And I will not cry”, he makes Lear cry with him, he makes sure he implants a Lear in every audience’s heart – he makes them cry as well. It is imperative to state however that at times this interplay of theatre-reality and narrative-reality got over-played a bit – the reference of Edmund being an illegitimate son of Gloucester! The reflection that every individual is actually a tangent, a mark on legitimacy is a bit far-fetched and half-baked. However this can be treated as an aberration.

            Minimalism has been exercised in theatre for long. However, minimalism in any adaptation of King Lear (or well sort of) is not so obvious.  In the set design, to the characterization of a single actor playing Lear and fool and also a clown call for appreciation. Atul Kumar as Clown Lear is mesmerizing in his evocation. He is deft, subtle, physical and in moments of crises tucking on the strings. They always say, a clown is actually a sad person.  This clown says at one point “I hate clowns”. His submission to the cauldron of life makes him endearing. This is where Atul is so riveting – he moves with the grace of a swan, suddenly leaps like a leopard and then rests his case since he has no more word to speak.

            The dialogues are refreshing, punctuated with comical references all through-out, a must for satirical slants that try to internalize this style of theatre and involves audience participation to the full. Timing and the sense of it is important – the director made sure that the course of the play, the swings between the fade outs are punctuated to perfection. The filmic reference of the archetype father figure in the Japanese Samurai or the apparently rustic French accent have been borrowed for the sake of stripping the patina off any historical, cultural or social milieu. This works well but as I mentioned before, the swings from the clown’s (which is us – directly) world to the world of Lear (we are ‘believed’ to internalize Lear by then) is laden with few jerks which do tend to be jarring at times. Since this is the first show, I hope the director-actor duo will make it tighter, shedding redundant ornamental digressions for the sake of theatre.

            Odeon is the theatre festival organized by Vodafone for the last ten years, this year being the eleventh. The corporate organization spares nothing in promoting the festival which needless to say is skewed towards the elite of the society.  Art had always thrived with the help of entrepreneurs and theatre is no exception. The Bangla stage is reviving its lost glory with some profitable productions for the last two years or so. These festivals ensure that ideas are exchanged and the faith in this media is bolstered.

Clown Lear enforces that belief – amidst the pomp and glamour of the ruthless metro, there is time to sit back and reflect. Thank you Rajat Kapoor and Atul Kumar, for providing with that opportunity.

                                                     

Soumitra is Lear!

The first Saturday in December and Madhusudan Mancha in South Kolkata was running packed house. A theatre show of any magnitude drawing such a big audience is rare by any standards. Given the fact that a week before when the ticket distribution started, people thronged the counter almost five hours before. And, within a couple of hours of opening the counter, the shows were full! Blame it on one person – Soumitra Chatterjee. Raja Lear - the production of Minerva Repertory – the first in Bengal with Repertory’s own full-time actors and few guest actors like Soumitra was stopped for almost 6 months since its first show in November 2010.

            Soumitra Chatterjee had been successful in theatre – a huge box-office crowd-puller given his star image, but at the same time had been intriguing in his theatre productions – something he sadly cannot exercise much in cinema these days. William Shakespeare’s King Lear is one of Chatterjee’s dream roles and he had been vocal about his wish to play the king. In Catherine Berge’s compassionate documentary on Soumitra named Gaach there were snippets of the play that the legendary thespian acted along with Rabi Ghosh playing the Fool.  That had however increased our thirst to watch Chatterjee play Lear in a full-fledged play. It is great to experience the play hence, considering the wait we have borne with as audience.

            The play directed by Suman Mukhopadhyay (who like Soumitra is carelessly confident and flows freely between theatre and films but as a director) is setup with a grand design, interesting use of architectural levels and light projections. The background score is dramatic befitting the epic saga. Acting is very important in this type of play that relies a lot on lengthy dialogues and in being predominantly verbose to carry forward the narrative. Unfortunately, the standard of acting is not consistently carried forward through the breadth of the play – as a result the viewing experience is laden with discomfiture in parts.

            The main attraction of the play is however Soumitra. The majority of the audience in mid forties and above did gather in large numbers to savour Chatterjee’s one of finest performance. And it may be one of his last as well. The element of nostalgic remembrances towards Bengal’s foremost international acting talent, arguably the greatest thespian who donned Bengal theatre and acted with same finesse on screen as well. There are other greats in the long tradition of Bengal’s performing art culture but none is as creatively successful in both the platforms as Chatterjee. He is on stage for more than two hours in a play close to three hours. The physical acting is stupendous. There is the violent impetus, the blind swagger against any voice that is not relenting, the royal impatience – King Lear is embodied in flesh and soul. The original play and this adaptation as well successfully vacillate between the ebb and tide of emotions, embedded with typical Machiavellian villains, of deceit and misconceptions. So sways the mood of Lear – from a king of England to pauper at heart – he earns pity from the audience for being confronted in haste by his cold-blooded elder daughters. His longing for being loved and for being cradled by his daughters make the Fool jibe at him - "he has made his daughters his mothers”.  The father’s innate love and fervor makes Lear endearingly human – and not just a royal crown. Soumitra’s pathos, the anxiety, the wounded father is as much the king as any Bengali father. In deft touches he plays to the heart, connecting to the soul which gets wounded seeing at the battered father.

            In a review of Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear (refer here: http://www.newquestindia.com/Archive/173-174/Html/The%20Last%20Lear.html), I maintained that Amitabh Bachchan had failed to understand the melancholic drops of Lear, he only managed to shout at full thunder, just that. Soumitra, lived Lear on stage, fumbling, childish and at times lamenting for not having stripped his royal overcoat earlier. In a way, Soumitra ropes in the audience with him, Lear leaves the mortal structure – reverberates in the auditorium and then resides in the soul of every audience. When he murmurs to his youngest daughter Cordelia “won’t you stay back just a while more, dear” Soumitra takes our breath away for the tragedy of life, for Lear and his haplessly dead three daughters but more for the absurd nothingness of our mundane lives.

            The ‘dance of death’ seemed plucked straight out of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal but that created a brilliant theatric moment. Notwithstanding Soumitra’s health conditions there should be an effort to digitize the production for posterity – if the Bengali stage and the Bengali audience care to shed off their latent disinterestedness at the slightest pretext, that is.