This week at Panjim’s sports venue, the SAG Ground, the very first shows of a unique theatre experience will be staged. Talatum — The Circus , a collaboration between director Abhilash Pillai and scenographer Deepan Sivaraman, is an adventurous retelling of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest . It will be staged in a veritable circus tent retrofitted for the purposes of the ‘stage spectacular’ that is now a Sivaraman hallmark. The show has been created in Kerala with circus performers from established companies from across India, and local and national theatre artistes and technicians.
Although some listings have billed this as a National School of Drama (NSD) production, the NSD has nothing to do with this undertaking, which has been produced by the Serendipity Arts Festival, that began on December 16. The genesis can certainly be traced back to a research project that Pillai had conducted at the NSD when he was part of its faculty. In this, Pillai examined ways and means of embedding a theatrical narrative into an existing performative form, which the circus most definitely was. Much of the original text has been shorn away leaving only sparse multi-lingual lines, and the production is more an evocation of visual spectacle and physical theatre, and perhaps, much more universally accessible because of that.
A couple of actors who had trained at a circus during Pillai's exploration have come on board for this production, their skilled bodies offering a kind of progression from actors who hold drama only with words. However, even actors trained in a physical idiom stand in some contrast to the incredibly spry circus professionals, to whom an intrepid physicality comes so much more naturally. Yet, Pillai and Sivaraman hope to achieve a magical seamlessness that would irrevocably establish the idea that all these players belong to the same universe. Part of this is achieved through Pillai’s inventive casting choices. “Several circus artistes play the Ariels, or spirits,” says Sivaraman. “So the panchabhuta , or the elements, are conveyed entirely by them. They fly, they create fire, carry out magical sequences.” Characters like Prospero, Alonso or Caliban, are performed by trained actors. Interestingly, Sycorax, the deceased Algerian sorceress banished to the doomed island that is the setting of The Tempest , who remains unseen in the original, is represented as a huge puppet whose legs are sprawled around the arena of performance. Through a curtain placed at its stomach, the characters and contraptions make their entries and exits. It could certainly prove to be a compelling represent-ation of an earth-mother who is not just a woman, but the island itself.
“Combining the circus with theatre is one way of pushing the boundaries of spectatorship,” says Sivaraman. Indeed, even as the site is still being engineered for the opening performance, one can find the markers of a surreal epic in the making. The tent is similar to the Big Top of the traditional circus, but inside, structural elements set up the ‘theatre in the round’. Transmission style pylons mark the territory, decked with light fixtures.
There is the smell of turps in the air, as props are hand-painted. A metal hoop, unobtrusively tucked away to one side, brings to mind trapeze acts to be. Initially, there were plans to flood the stage with six inches of water and play out the sea-borne scenes in a much more immersive fashion, an idea that has now been scuppered due to logistical problems. Yet, there is a dilapidated life-boat, an actual found object at a dockyard, that will be used in a pivotal scene. “In one scene, the boat will literally fly skyward, like a vessel that becomes a airborne balloon,” says Sivaraman.
Pillai and Sivaraman are contemporaries who have both been trained in the West and are known for their hybrid productions, in which the technical fidelity we see in international theatre is married with an aesthetic that is markedly Indian. “We understand each other implicitly. We speak the same language in both theory and practice,” says Sivaraman. It is a partnership that has weathered five productions. This is certainly an expensive undertaking. Sivaraman pegs the cost to the festival exchequer to around Rs. 60 lakh, three times that of Khasakinthe Itihasam , his previous large-scale production. While that production had employed community talent to tell a rooted tale, Talatum… ’s roster comprises of professional talent hired at professional rates. Serendipty have started out with just three shows, but they have designs to take the show across the country. And Talatum… hopes to recoup its costs in a manner similar to successful circus enterprises.
The author is a freelance writer and theatre critic
