Dreaming Shakespeare

After the stupendous success of Piya Behrupriya, an adaption of Twelfth Night — Atul Kumar reimagines A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Dream Collaboration: Atul Kumar’s Khwab Sa is ambitious because it seeks to bring under the fold of a single production a cornucopia of myriad forms.

Following the path taken by recent premiering productions, actor-director Atul Kumar’s new play, Khwab Sa , an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream , opens in Mumbai this weekend after a run at Bengaluru. The play was initially commissioned by Kuang Hong Arts (or KHAM), a Taiwanese arts conglomerate that peppers its year-long regional cultural programming with international acts, including selections from India. Having caught a staging of Kumar’s riotous Twelfth Night adaptation, Piya Behrupiya , in Singapore, they were eager to support his next venture. The first ever performances of Khwab Sa took place at Taipei in August last year.

That this new venture would be a Shakespearean adaptation is no surprise given that Piya Behrupiya was a breakout international success for Kumar’s group, The Company Theatre. However, while that play blended the North Indian form of nautanki with Kumar’s distinctive brand of comic improvised theatre, this new work is particularly ambitious because it seeks to bring under the fold of a single production a cornucopia of myriad forms. Contemporary dance set to a electronic score, Hindustani classical music interludes, and theatrical set-pieces performed in a purely invented dialect, or Hindi gibberish, are all part of the mix. The original play itself features competing plot-lines with little overlap, which certainly allows for an experimental intermingling of performance styles. “I have always been fascinated with the play, with its fairytale quality. Yet, there are darker themes within,” says Kumar.

When Kumar would think of the four lovers in the forest, he always imagined them as contemporary dancers. He had been toying with the idea of creating a contemporary dance piece for some time now. Witnessing a performance by Diya Naidu in 2015 opened him up to the possibilities of the form. “I had problems with the contemporary dance scene in India, apart from the work of a few like Chandralekha, Navtej Johar and Padmini Chettur. However, I was completely besotted by Diya’s work,” he says. Of course, his company has supported protégés like Sujay Saple, who has been experimenting with developing a hybrid dance and theatre form. Naidu, from the Attakalari Centre for Movement Arts in Bengaluru, was brought on board as

Khwab

Sa ’s choreographer. At the time, the production was meant to be purely a dance exploration of the pastoral romance at the centre of the play.

When KHAM evinced interest, it seemed like an excellent opportunity to add more facets to the production. “I was very clear though that I did not want to repeat

Piya Behrupiya , that would have been an easy trap to fall into,” says Kumar. There are collaborators common to both projects. Saurabh Nayyar, who had played a ribald Malvolio in Piya Behrupiya , was recruited to adapt the ‘play within the play’ performed by six amateur actors in the original. For these sequences, the original text has been replaced by the aforementioned Hindi gibberish, harnessing the phonetic rhythms of colloquial tongues to create a completely new language with an appropriate rustic flavour. This was familiar turf for Kumar, as he had himself perfected a brand of European gibberish over the years in his theatrical outings with Rajat Kapoor like Hamlet The Clown Prince and Nothing Like Lear .

“Increasingly I had started picturing Titania and Oberon, the queen and king of fairies, as formidable Hindustani classical vocalists,” remembers Kumar. When the play opened in Taipei, Kumar felt that the production’s experimental framework had not entirely fallen into place. The use of thumri as repartee, rather than an elaborately rambling expression of love, was a stylistic choice that wasn’t satisfying to Kumar, “It stood out, not quite blending in. The thumris, and some taranas, were beautiful but they didn’t gel with the production”. The version that they will now perform in India is markedly different from the production that opened in Taiwan.

A chance trip to Spain’s (or the world’s) party capital in Ibiza introduced Kumar to the uptempo universe of electronic dubstep music. This was exactly the edgy contemporary sound he was looking for. While there have been forays on the stage into this musical realm, most notably by Sunil Shanbag in his

Club Desire , it is a genre that is still relatively fresh on the ears of Indian theatre-goers. From there, it wasn’t too much of a leap to rope in the talented Anurag Shanker to compose the play’s immersive score. Shanker’s earlier work includes the edgy soundscape that made the indie film,

Sulemani Keeda such a phantasmagorical trip.

The play’s journey has included many compromises and challenges, but has also been peppered with revelatory moments that have been remarkably fulfilling for Kumar and his team. “When the rhythms change mid-performance, from spoken word to a long gestural performance, to the strains of a tanpura, the merging that happens in front of our eyes has been quite an experience to live through,” he says. It is certainly a seamlessness that one can look forward to.

The writer is a playwright and stage critic

Khwab Sa will be staged at the Bal Gandharva Rang Mandir, today and on January 29 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets and other details at bookmyshow.com