The Mousetrap, not to be confused with the long-running Agatha Christie whodunit that was recently staged in Mumbai, is the name given by Hamlet to the ‘play within the play’ performed in the eponymous Shakespearean drama.
“The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” he says, in allusion to the murder of his father by his brother Claudius, now king of Denmark and married to Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. The play within, actually called The Murder of Gonzago, depicts a murder executed in much the same fashion as Hamlet’s father’s. As it unfolds, guilt and perhaps contrition are writ large on Claudius’ face, and he rushes from the room.
In Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014), Shahid Kapur and a bevy of backup dancers perform the implicating ballad, ‘Bismil Bismil’, using elements of the Kashmiri folk form, the bhand pather , even as the entire saga shifts to Kashmir from Denmark. But in some of the earliest adaptations — the silent film Khoon-e-Nahak (1928), Sohrab Modi’s Khoon ka Khoon (1935) and Kishore Sahu’s Hamlet (1954) — the ‘mousetrap’ is a play, and not a song.
Sahu’s film owed a huge debt to the definitive Laurence Olivier version from 1948, with only the gravediggers afforded a rousing comic number.
Modi’s version was essentially a recording of the play being staged in a studio against huge painted backdrops of realistic Victorian settings. Regrettably, no trace remains of the original print. Of course, there are Hindi films in which a similar trope is used that might not have been directly received from Shakespeare.
Saga of betrayal
For instance, in Pagla Kahin Ka (1970), the song ‘ Suno zindagi gaati hai ’, performed at the wedding of Prem Chopra and Helen, is a saga of betrayal and murder, with even a Helen lookalike, Madhumati, roped in for the cabaret re-enactment. Pagla Kahin Ka is one of those 60s confections that were idiosyncratically original and wholly unoriginal, all at the same time.
Then there are Karz and its clones, which feature pivotal song sequences in which a murdered man, reborn as another, re-enacts the killing (usually at the hands of his paramour) in a song-and-dance gala. The 1980 original directed by Subhash Ghai was loosely based on The Reincarnation of Peter Proud , which featured several déjà vu moments, but none that could qualify as a bonafide ‘mousetrap’; so Karz ’s evergreen ballad by Laxmikant Pyarelal, ‘ Ek hasina thi ’, performed to expose Simi Garewal’s complicity, was a dramatic invention that would have done Hamlet proud. Farah Khan’s homage Om Shanti Om (2007) and Satish Kaushik’s remake Karzzzz (2008) both feature impressively mounted ‘items’, all using riffs from the Karz signature tune lifted from George Benson’s ‘We as love’.
Variations to a theme can be found in Karz ’s Southern remakes. In the Telugu film, Aatmabalam (1985), the ‘mousetrap’ takes place at a college function, and the victim’s surviving family members participate in the mêlée. In Enakkul Oruvan (1984), the Tamil remake, there is no incriminating song, and the central murder is not committed by a vengeful fiancée, but she is framed for it.
Of course, in countless Indian films, the ‘song within the film’ is a dramatic device rife with metaphors and allusions, rather than a natural part of the narrative as in Hollywood musicals. A case in point being Don (1978), where almost every song is a ‘mousetrap’ in disguise.
The writer sought out cinema that came at least two generations before him, even as a child. That nostalgia tripping has persisted for a lifetime.
