When the dead sons are taken for their last rites in the recent Indian production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children , director Quasar Thakore Padamsee decides to dispense with their mortal remains, in a manner of speaking. Corpses on stage are usually actors playing dead or so-called ‘living cadavers’, as described by film critic André Loiselle. In the play, wheeled in on a wooden body-cart to greet his stoic mother for a final farewell, the older son Alif/Eilif (hitherto played by Abhishek Krishnan) is now a starched set of clothes recognisable as those of its character. Later, however, as a visible corporeal presence, Krishnan rejoins the ensemble in regulation attire, as one in a crowd of soldiers or refugees, but his voice still soars above the din as Alif’s once did. In a talk, Padamsee has spoken of how this decision of representing the dead came about after a discussion on funeral customs. It’s the occasional directorial flourish in the play that falls in line with techniques of stage performance that Brecht, one of the great masters of theatre, had attempt to develop over decades as a reaction to the bourgeois theatre of his time.
To understand this, one only needs to hark back to the hyperrealism of cinema, which always strives to create an unmitigated immersive experience for its audience, through emotional manipulation or technology, with a rigour that often achieves a high degree of verisimilitude. Think of how Hans Zimmer’s pulsating score and Hoyte van Hoytema’s sweeping visuals in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk places us right in the middle of the action, adrenaline coursing through our veins as if we were ourselves being evacuated from a war zone. For Brecht, this emotional roller coaster would qualify as slow ‘narcotics’ that lulls an audience into numbing complacency, through the pulling of psychological strings, as it were.
Theatrical spectacle
What cinema employs with impunity was a feature of contemporary theatre in 1920-1930s Germany, when Brecht’s star was on the rise. The theatre experience hinged upon smoke and mirrors that called for a suspension of disbelief readily bought into by an unsuspecting populace, who emerged from playhouses having ‘felt things’, having laughed or cried or cursed, but ended up none the wiser for all that. Brecht wanted to engage the intellect of his audience, whom he dubbed ‘spect-actors’ because of the active rationale they would bring to a viewing. He wasn’t interested in an uncritical engagement with his material. Instead of building the illusion of a narrative, he wanted to break it down, or ‘make alien’ its themes. This is alluded to in his famous quote, “Sometimes it’s more important to be human than to have good taste.” When the familiar is made strange, an audience can be induced to ‘think’ about a situation, even one that is done to death, in a brand new light. Brecht constantly wrestled with this notion of ‘defamiliarisation’ in a body of work that is now classified as epic theatre.
Many instances of Brecht’s ‘alienation effects’, as they are called colloquially, abound in Padamsee’s production, either inherited from the text, or drawn from stage conventions now taken for granted, but with their genesis in Brecht’s work. These include an unscrupulous, and therefore resolutely unheroic, protagonist (played by Arundhati Nag); actors playing multiple parts; the extensive use of songs, the presentation of the ‘dead’, and how each episode advances the play by an entire year (its 12 scenes represent the 12 years of a raging war). In the very first scene, after a musical prologue, two soldiers (Aseem Hattangady and Tavish Bhattacharyya) of an extremist faction walk straight into the stalls, with the house lights switched on, and engage in a conversation that is directly addressed to the audience, almost as if the world they belonged to was intrinsically artificial. The efficacy of such methods remains a moving target of sorts, and even theatre-goers expect a level of realism in a medium like live performance that constantly flirts with disguised fallacy.
In later shows, Padamsee decided to introduce the soldiers directly on stage as characters rather than the actors playing them. Ultimately staging a Brecht play involves the striking of an elusive balance between his groundbreaking ideas of staging and the modern expectations of paying audiences who readily want to undertake emotional journeys, or ‘leave their brains behind’, as the saying goes. The success, artistic or otherwise, of a production can fall between the cracks of such disparate approaches.
Reflecting inner struggles
Of course, it’s not just in Brecht’s plays that alienation can play a powerful and sobering role. Pushan Kripalani’s recent staging of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House does away with the plushly upholstered living-room interiors that characterises English theatre in the city. He places the play’s familiar archetypal heroine Nora (Ira Dubey) within a circle of light, armed with an arsenal of classic declamations and vintage poses, while the constellation of characters around her is embodied by only one actor — Joy Sengupta does the honours. In doing so, he takes the milieu as far away from Ibsen’s naturalistic chamber-piece setting as possible, perhaps to bring to relief Nora’s psychological tussles in a situation in which she is far more isolated than she would like to believe.
Similarly sparse is the design of Motley’s staging of Florian Zeller’s The Father , where the turf of performance is the living quarters of a man, Andre (played by Naseeruddin Shah), grappling with the onset of Alzheimer’s. The rooms are marked out on the floor with thick masking tape – always unreal, and thus, always dynamic with this play’s shifting tides of emotion. Little or no furniture exists in this space, and objects of household use, like cutlery or sinks, are mimed by actors to a precisely overlaid soundscape, adding to the claustrophobia of the situation. It’s a world of amplified noise, almost like being in the middle of a permanent hangover, which mirrors the degeneration of Andre’s mind to devastating effect at times.
