For more than 400 years, the plays of William Shakespeare have been read, performed and adapted across the world. Not only with the reverence that is due to the venerable Bard, but also, fortunately, with utmost irreverence: such as the delightful comic version of Hamlet that was brought to India last year by the British travelling group of cycling actors ‘The Handlebards’. With glorious silliness, the four performers combined the intricate and entertaining plot with a message of frugality — Avoid lavish productions! Travel everywhere, but travel light! Yes, it felt entirely appropriate to be watching this daft performance of a Shakespearean tragedy, with the fight scene enacted using kitchen spoons and ladles, in a restaurant lounge in Bengaluru; and not only because of the trill of cycle bells and the message about environmental sustainability. I still laugh when I think of the spoons and ladles.
This year there was also the superb Piya Behrupiya by The Company Theatre, a magnificent musical version of Twelfth Night directed by Atul Kumar. One of the many delights of this rich, gorgeous nautanki -style adaptation is a kind of meta-commentary in which the play dialogues with the looming background figure of Shakespeare. Like the best adaptations, Piya Behrupiya is not only a tribute to Shakespeare but an innovative masterpiece in its own right.
Many adaptations
It has been a full season of Shakespeare adaptations, not only on the stage but also in fiction. The most successful adaptations are those that feel as if the writer would have written them anyway, with or without the original text. One example is Ian McEwan’s riveting Nutshell , in which an eerily articulate foetus (his mother listens to Radio 4) tells the story of how his mother and uncle are plotting to kill his father. The novel draws its epigraph from Hamlet : “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space — were it not that I have bad dreams.” With its themes of greed, lust and indecision, this intelligent crime thriller is set in the London of today and in a Europe filled with uncertainty.
A century after Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf set up the Hogarth Press to publish the best of contemporary fiction, Hogarth has commissioned a series of Shakespeare adaptations by some of the most popular contemporary novelists. As part of this series, Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl is a retelling of my least favourite Shakespeare play, The Taming of the Shrew . I have never liked the play, for the sexism and misogyny of its language and plot. Tyler’s version is set in modern-day Baltimore where Kate Battista, in her late twenties, keeps house for her eccentric scientist father and her teenage sister. After Kate got sent home from college for being rude to the professor — such is the fate of so many outspoken girls in STEM fields — she never went back to college. She now works as an assistant teacher at a preschool. A feminised profession: there is only one male teaching assistant in the preschool. This is one of the rare times when an early childhood classroom setting features in a novel, and Tyler makes the most of it with her ear for comic dialogue. One of the children’s fathers wants to talk to Kate about his daughter’s finger-sucking. Kate doesn’t mince words: “Chances are she’ll stop soon enough, once her fingers grow so long that she pokes both her eyes out.”
Outspoken Kate! Even in the 21st century, outspoken women are viewed with disapproval. Kate’s father is trying to set her up with Pyotr, his brilliant graduate student at Johns Hopkins, because Pyotr (Petruchio!) needs a green card. Thus, four centuries after Shakespeare’s original play, women continue to be tamed into secondary roles. Tyler’s Kate makes a valiant attempt to convince her teenage sister that men have a harder time of it today, being confined in rigid definitions of masculinity: but it’s a weak argument in this context and, like Bunny, we aren’t convinced. Maybe that’s what Shakespeare intended too: that lingering feeling that all’s not well and hasn’t ended as well as it might have.
Retelling The Tempest
Also part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series is Margaret Atwood’s brilliant Hag-Seed , an inventive adaptation of The Tempest set in a prison. Felix Phillips, a reclusive theatre director, develops a production of Shakespeare’s final play with a cast of prisoners inside a correctional institution. And why not? As he explains to his players, “Shakespeare has something for everyone, because that’s who his audience was: everyone, from high to low and back again.”
Indeed, adds Felix, it is due to sheer luck that we even have the plays at all: “He had no intention of being a classic! He was simply an actor-manager trying to keep afloat. It’s only due to luck that we have Shakespeare at all. Nothing was even published till he was gone. His old friends stuck the plays together out of scraps — bunch of clapped-out actors trying to remember what they’d said, after the guy was dead!”
It is assumed that enacting Shakespeare will be harmless expressive therapy for the prisoners, but Felix knows that theatre is an extremely powerful form of expression. The guards at the prison grin as they let him through:
“What could Felix possibly be suspected of smuggling, a harmless old thespian like him? It’s the words that should concern you, he thinks at them. That’s the real danger. Words don’t show up on scanners.”
The novel shows how Shakespeare’s language and plot become stepping stones not only to literacy but also to the education of the mind and the heart. This is the function of literature. “Watching the many faces watching their own faces as they pretended to be someone else – Felix found that strangely moving. For once in their lives, they loved themselves.”
The best adaptations tell the stories afresh; at the same time, they do not merely bear traces of the original, but also continue to speak to the original text. Adaptations bring the comfort of recognition, but also the intellectual delight of the new. Set in contemporary times, they shine a light on enduring questions.
The writer is in the IAS, currently based in Bengaluru.
