An incongruous credit occasionally found innocuously tucked into theatre posters is one that reads ‘conceived and directed by’. It is often accompanied by the rather conspicuous absence of any kind of writing attribution. This is usually shorthand for a theatrical piece ‘inspired’ from a pre-existing work that cannot be acknowledged for whatever reasons. Certainly, many classic Western texts have been performed in myriad Indian guises, and their makers have attempted, not always successfully, to obscure the source of their inspiration.
In some cases, especially for smaller theatre groups, the purchase rights of performance can be prohibitive — anything from $60 to $120 per show — which eats into their already thin margins. For William Golding’s Lord of the Flies , the performance rights come with another caveat: the mandatory purchase of as many production scripts as there are actors in the cast.
For Manav Kaul’s aRanya theatre group — who wanted to open an Indianised version of the play with an eight-show opening run at Prithvi Theatre — the logistics simply didn’t add up. So instead, the audience got Island ‘conceived and directed by’ Neha Singh and Ajitesh Gupta. Now, unshackled from directives that mandate adherence to the original script word to word, the director duo was able to bring in a new language [Hindi], some original touches and devised physical work by its youthful ensemble, but the gnawing sense of this essentially being a borrowed enterprise remained. For some groups, the money associated with royalties is not perhaps much of a consideration, but the need to adapt a text to an Indian locale is much more germane. With a failed attempt to translocate Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie to the fishing docks at Mazgaon, Rahul da Cunha devised another method. With his next play, he went right ahead and retrofitted The Siddhus of Upper Juhu as a middle-class Indian enterprise in every way. However, it came at a cost: the name of the original play, The Prisoner of Second Avenue , and its playwright, Neil Simon, were expunged from the records. Since the outfit in concern was Rage Productions, and the play was showcased as part of the Aadyam initiative, certainly more issues should have been raised than there actually were.
Last week, a new play opened at Prithvi Theatre: 27 02 02 Zaheen Shah is ‘conceived and directed by’ Maneesh Verma and Kalyani Hiwale. Since the eponymous date is that of the Godhra carnage, one could reasonably expect a hard-hitting piece set in riot-ravaged Gujarat; and certainly many Gujaratis were in attendance on opening night. The Ishrat Jahan case has dominated the airwaves this season, and Rana Ayyub’s The Gujarat Files has just been released. So, the soul-searching continues. However, a few ‘reels’ in, it was fairly evident that we were witnessing a rip-off of Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman, later made into a film by Roman Polanski. For the above stated reasons, perhaps calling it a rip-off is a tad harsh, but it would take nothing less than a credible effort to overlook the underlying ethical issues here. Zaheen Shah is anything but.
The premise: “Paulina Salas is a former political prisoner in an unnamed Latin American country who had been raped by her captors, led by a doctor whose face she never saw. The doctor played Schubert’s composition ‘Death and the Maiden’ during the act of rape; hence the play’s title. Years later, when a stranger comes home with her husband, Paulina recognises his voice and mannerism as that of her rapist, and takes him captive in order to put him on trial and extract a confession from him.” Here the song in question is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s ‘ Jeena Kaisa Pyar Bina ’, one of his more maudlin fusion tracks with Eddie Veder that one cannot quite imagine as the definitive piece that triggers off so many associations.
The sense of being in proximity of a largely derivative work is compounded by the use of Philip Glass’s score from The Hours , to accentuate the depression of Paulina [Komal Solanki here, played by Dilnaz Irani]. The music is textured and haunting, but so overused in urban Indian theatre that it becomes a walking cliché expected to elevate the drabbest scenes, but having quite the opposite effect. The play is performed by three otherwise dependable actors — Irani, Joy Sengupta and Harsh Khurana — who seem to invest themselves full-bloodedly into the proceedings. Yet, Irani’s portrayal of her character’s precarious hold on sanity is in danger of being too close to the bone, reducing Komal to a virago who cannot quite hope to command the veracity that she claims. Sengupta is, likewise, a dithering mess by the end, never quite a human rights lawyer with an unimpeachable sense of probity. Khurana, at least, delivers the conceit that the most heinous crimes can sometimes be committed by those with the most affable personalities, as this doctor given to such easy banter seems to be. By contrast, his lack of contrition during an overwrought final encounter, in which he confesses to his misdemeanours, isn’t quite as chilling, but merely the predictable end to a convoluted saga.
Polanski’s version was a taut psychological thriller borne out of moral dilemmas. Zaheen Shah situates the action against the backdrop of the Gujarat riots, but the connections are too tenuous and too lax to create any real resonances. In the end, when all the major riots that have afflicted India are listed out via sombre projections, one cannot help but feel that the play is taking its second-hand nature too much to heart with this disingenuous evoking of real-world issues in an enterprise that lives up to none of its lofty concerns.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
27 02 02 Zaheen Shah is a rip-off of Death and the Maiden by
Ariel Dorfmani
