The Aadyam stable this year has got Nadir Khan’s 12 Angry Jurors , with Rage Productions coming up next. It is a taut courtroom drama that has been in vogue for more than six decades. Serving on a jury for a manslaughter trial was a gut-wrenching experience for playwright Reginald Rose. His memories included a “terrific, furious, eight-hour argument” in the “impressive, solemn setting [of] a great big wood-panelled courtroom”. He channelled these recollections into the play 12 Angry Men , in which a dozen men are part of a similar jury. It was first broadcast on television in 1954 and has since then spawned several stage and screen adaptations over the years. In fact, the most famous adaption has been the homonymous 1957 film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Henry Fonda.
With dramatic flourishes and intense close-ups and the almost exclusive use of a single set, Lumet perfectly recreated the tense claustrophobic setting of a closed-room jury chamber.
“My work is to replicate this bottled-up tension on stage, which is a completely different medium,” says Khan. “We do have some surprises in store with the production design.” The future of a young slum-boy charged with murder rides on the seeds of reasonable doubt planted with meticulous persuasion on the proceedings of the trial. This makes Rose’s play a fascinating study of vacillating human nature and consensus-building. Albeit, there is ample dramatic license and broad speculation of the kind that would never be allowed in a real life jury situation.
Khan’s previous outing was the equally harrowing TheGod of Carnage , also for Aadyam. This one had two sets of parleying parents debating on their respective sons’ playground behaviour. So, Khan is no stranger to dramas with a predilection for intense soul-searching. “Here, I am working with 12 diverse egos, in terms of characters, none of whom can be cut away from at any stage. So it was a real challenge,” he says. Interestingly, both these plays take place almost in real time, which adds considerably to the immediacy of the conflicts in the production.
The 12 men in the original, a mixed bag of personalities, are only ever identified by numbers. This has allowed for more inclusive ensembles in later retellings. For instance, when women have been cast, the play has been retitled 12 Angry Men and Women , or, as in this case, 12 Angry Jurors . In the American justice system, women in the jury have been looked at derisively up until the 20th century. The play was arranged for an all-woman cast fairly early by playwright Sherman L. Sergal, and one of the earliest known productions of 12 Angry Women was a student effort in Lindenwood College in Missouri. This was in 1955, when there were still a few states in the U.S. that excluded women from jury service. In fact, there has only ever been one all-women jury: in 2012, in the case State of Florida versus George Zimmerman. A sobering 2015 research study titled One Angry Woman determined how the expression of anger increased influence for men, but decreases it for women, during group deliberation: pointing to the difficulties still faced by women in jury duty. Khan’s mixed-gender ensemble has been cast without taking into account any purportedly masculine or feminine predilections, “In fact, I’ve tried to do quite the opposite.”
The characters in this new production are decidedly Indian in speech and deportment, but no Indianisation has been effected in the script. This makes it more like the original than say, Basu Chatterjee’s 1986 film adaptation, Ek Ruka Hua Faisla , best remembered for the histrionics of such young actors as Annu Kapoor and Pankaj Kapur playing apoplectic senior citizens. Kapur, especially, delivered a tour de force as the holdout juror who only changes his vote right at the very end. Khan’s cast includes veterans like Rajit Kapur, primed to be the voice of reason, and Sohrab Ardeshir, the sole holdover from The God of Carnage . Deven Khote takes on the intransigent part made so memorable by Pankaj Kapur.
While it’s harder to access the play’s chequered history on stage, given that there are no ‘prints’ that survive, this writer had attended an interesting production at Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms in 2003, directed by maverick Guy Masterson.
The play’s selling point was that its cast was almost entirely made up of stand-up comedians. Most certainly, the repartee and biting satire in the writing can lend itself to laugh-a-minute humour, as one many expect from such a motley crew of outsiders. Instead we got a crackerjack show that was nail-bitingly intense. It went down in history as the highest grossing drama the Edinburgh Fringe had ever had.
Perhaps, the most intriguing spin-off has been Zeina Daccache’s 12 Angry Lebanese: The Documentary , which chronicles efforts to stage an adaptation of 12 Angry Men with inmates inside Beirut’s Roumieh Prison. Although Syria doesn’t have a jury system, jailed men certainly have a direct relationship with notions of culpability, or lack thereof. Despite the title, the participants included Lebanese, Nigerians, Syrians, Egyptians and Palestinians, all of whom come with their own set of cultural assumptions. This brings us to the underlying racial themes in 12 Angry Men . Even if the defendant is only ever mentioned as “the boy”, it is clear that his implied race [black] is an important factor for an all-white jury.
This assumed significance at a time when Americans had begun the self-introspection about their prejudices that would lead to the social upheavals of the 1960s. In Chatterjee’s film, the defendant is quite clearly, Muslim, even if the community is never named.
Khan says he wanted the character’s back-story to be pieced together by the actors themselves, offering no more clues than the script did. It will be certainly interesting to see what kind of world-view emerges from this exploration.
12 Angry Jurorswill be performed at St Andrew’s Auditorium in Bandra, on June 4-5, and at the Jamshed Bhabha Theatre at the NCPA, on June 18-19. Tickets are available on bookmyshow.com.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
