“You can not put everybody into a madhouse. You can not kill my thoughts.” These are the last words of Francis, the protagonist of Deepan Sivaraman’s contemporary theatrical adaptation of the 1920 German classic film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari .
Living in our times when death sentences are inflicted upon free thought, when voices of dissidence are strangulated, these words become more relevant and powerful than ever before, says Deepan Sivaraman, who is bringing the play to Thrissur, next week.
“ The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was considered an allegory on Hitler and his agenda, and it is supposed to have predicted the rise of Hitler. Caligari is a man who is capable of influencing the minds of people devoid of any rationality. Francis is the only character in the story who questions Caligari, but Caligari makes up a story that Francis is a mad man, a threat to the system and should be eliminated. This is exactly analogous with what is happening in present-day India, and in that context, this work is extremely politically relevant,” points out Deepan.
For Deepan, whose adaptation of O.V.Vijayan’s Khasakinte Ithihasam is still being performed in Kerala and outside and is drawing huge crowds, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is another attempt to challenge the hierarchy of the text in theatre. However, the biggest challenge that he faced during its making was that it was a student production, done as part of a course, ‘Space and Spectatorship’, at the Ambedkar University Delhi. So, the production took around five months.
“The central concern was how space works as a key component in theatre, because, at least in theatre, we never consider it as an important component like text, script or performative body. Space is always a given space,” says Deepan. For Dr. Caligari he chose the space first, a run-down warehouse on the University campus. The play evolved within this space.
Creating the narrative
Deepan Sivaraman as Alan in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
“And we found the text during the play-making process. Usually, it is the literature that leads our imagination, with everybody following the written text. But we had no written text to begin with, only a set of visuals and the space. The only available text was in the form of the film’s subtitles. The visual material was stronger than the text. So we had to create our own text. There was only the space, the visual material and the performative body, the actors.” The dramaturgy of the play, written by Purav Goswami, has a short yet philosophical text.
For Deepan, the nature of his performance space is always of paramount importance, with the arena or the thrust space being the preferred ones.
However, The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari takes place in an end on performance space that the audience seated in the front are facing. He says that here the audience is considered as people who are witnessing Caligari’s show, not merely the play.
“The audience becomes participants in that. Actors disappear into the auditorium and appear again. Alan and Francis represent the audience for Caligari’s show and Alan asks the question about his future.”
Closer to life
There is an element of darkness or the grotesque in Deepan’s works. “If art is a reflection of what happens in life, we cannot keep the grotesque out,” elaborates Sivaraman.
“In India, we traditionally consider that art has to generate ‘Ananda,’ or joy. All our traditional forms become beautiful. Even death becomes a beautiful thing. So, even when it comes to modern theatre, we want everything to look nice and beautiful. I believe that challenging this notion is very important, as life is sometimes problematic and dark.”
He strongly believes that the mobilisation of the audience on a large scale, a characteristic of his production of Khasakinte Ithihasam, is a need of our times.
“We should reclaim the theatre audience that we have lost,” he asserts. “This audience had been rebuilding itself steadily over the last 10 to 15 years, especially with the introduction of the International Theatre Festival of Kerala. However, most of the productions had one or two shows and that was the end, which was so frustrating. The most challenging part is how to continue showing the work to the people. Cinema has a mechanism that will take the work to the public. Even the visual art has the gallery system. Only theatre does not have any kind of mechanism to ensure an audience. So, building the audience should be a constant and steady process that needs to be developed consistently.”
The play, produced by Performance Studies Collective, New Delhi, in association with NSS Engineering College Alumni Bangalore (NECAB) and Blue Ocean Theatre, Bengaluru, will be staged at Bharat Murali Theatre, Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi campus, Thrissur, on October 13 (7.15 pm) and 14 (6.15 pm, 8.30 pm).
