The power, absolute or not, that stage directors wield is somewhat preciously uncommon. Choices about mood and music, theme and circumstance, pitch and tenor, are laid squarely on their shoulders even in projects where the mode of operation can be described as resolutely collaborative. They decide the spatial coordinates and emotional resonances that set up a play’s transient universe, so easily dismantled after each staging and as miraculously resurrected. The adrenaline of being quite indispensably in charge gives their personas that distinct fillip. Their names attach themselves irrevocably to a production, emblazoned on imagined marquee hoardings. It’s seemingly cocking a snook at the piffle notion that theatre is either a writer’s medium or an actor’s one. This all important middleman is quite simply the omniscient keeper of a play’s artistic fortunes.
Flirting with these ideas is a new digital theatre initiative called Mix the Play presented by the British Council. It’s an online exercise that allows armchair theatre enthusiasts to turn director for a few minutes or more, depending on how long they play the game. A presumptive director can scan through several audition videos, casting actors they’d like to work with. In addition, they also rule on the treatment of a play’s central conflicts, deciding whether it will be performed on stage or in an outdoor setting, and fix its music, so important to contemporary melodrama. After one has gingerly gone through each of the steps, voilà , a pre-recorded scene springs up that appears to adhere to all these parameters, rendering the director’s vision quite faithfully in a three-minute video clip that is eminently watchable, for the most part. Each decision appears to transform the scene in some way.
While the first edition of ‘Mix the Play’ featured British actors enacting a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream , its latest iteration has brought together a cast of Indian collaborators. The play and scene in question is the universal Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare and its classic balcony scene in which Juliet imagines a conversation, nay argument, with Romeo, even as he hides beneath her balcony. Earlier in the year, director Roysten Abel teamed up with actors Kalki Koechlin, Kriti Pant, Tushar Pandey and Adil Hussain to create an array of different versions of that same scene. The clips are now available to view on the ‘Mix the Play’ website. Of course, to get to each one, we need to follow the director’s yellow brick road, so wonderfully signposted and explained. Each path leads to a new outcome. For instance, in the ‘modern’ version, the actors meet in a café, and the lovers are impassioned but pragmatic. In the ‘cultural divide’ setting, they are a pair of Hindu and Muslim lovers (Love Jehadis, if you will) incarcerated in adjoining chambers, with Romeo craning his neck against the wall trying to catch each whisper uttered by Juliet. The actors, who account for four pairs of star-crossed lovers, are such distinct personas that music or setting don’t quite obliterate the elemental rhythms each pairing has. Hussain’s measured gravitas works well off Koechlin’s bewitching lassitude. Pandey’s raw vitality strangely matches well with Pant’s finesse of delivery. Yet, the actors seem to be far more serious than an exercise like this warrants.
Of course, the earlier edition featured an amusing scene between the queen of fairies, Titania, and the unfortunate Nick Bottom. It lent itself automatically to a light-hearted treatment. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, even if the high-flown lines appear to almost clamour for the slightest hint of irony, that important embellishment that allows Shakespeare to operate unchallenged in the most anachronistic of settings. Here, the contexts ring somewhat hollow. It must be remembered that it is only a scene, not an entire play. Its residual concerns must be necessarily extrapolated upon the expressive faces of the actors who are helped by the play’s own vaunted legacy. Of course, there is always the pay-off of seeing your name on a poster as the director extraordinaire of a piece of throwaway art. That certainly has its uses, as likes and shares on Facebook would attest to.
The author is a freelance writer and theatre critic
Visit mixtheplay. britishcouncil.org
