Tuesdays and Wednesdays at Prithvi Theatre, with its reduced rates of admittance and youthful audiences, often provide space for so-called fledgling works by upcoming theatremakers. In a creative ethos where simply experience might be no guarantee for quality, some of these pieces are decidedly edgier than weekend fare. Slated for this week is the Ujaagar Dramatic Association’s Shakespearean adaptation Kasumal Sapno. Based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play was first performed in 2014, and tonight’s outing will be its 25th show in five years, a figure telling of the problems of distribution faced by new groups. The title alludes to the reddish yellow ochre of the desert sand, with the bard’s iambic pentameter adapted afresh by Ipshita Chakraborty Singh as a libretto in a mix of local dialects, its composition redolent with the colours of Rajasthani folk music. Singh’s partners-in-crime on this endeavour include director Ajeet Singh Palawat and an animated ensemble from Jaipur.
Cultural nuance
“The Rajasthani preoccupation with princely courts and weddings has much in common with what Shakespeare writes about,” says Palawat, speaking of the ease of translocation, at least in terms of locale or theme. An influence he readily cites was a production he and Chakraborty Singh had watched during their days as students at the National School of Drama. It was a performance of Habib Tanvir’s Kaamdeo ka Apna Basant Ritu ka Sapna ( The Love God’s Own, A Spring Time Dream ), in which only the fairy kingdom and the drama troupe (or mandali ) from A Midsummer Night’s Dream found pride of place, not the star-crossed lovers. First staged in 1993, that play was created in the Nacha theatre form of Chhattisgarh, with text in rough-hewn Bundelkandi, perfectly integrated with a force of flavour and style into an ‘alien’ narrative, albeit one that is considered particularly pliable to cultural alterations.
“While Bottom is still an actor in the mandali who ends up with a donkey’s head, our Puck (Shahjahan Hussain) is called Pyare, and his character is like the raksha sutra we wear on our hands,” says Palawat, of one of the significant changes to the original in his play, whereby the mischievous sprite becomes a force of benevolence and protection. A Rajasthani form that has been plucked from obscurity by Kasumal Sapno is that of the nakal , an improvisatory style of mimicry whose artistes create dramatic grist from topical and local references, even as they attempt to perform, or stumble their way through, familiar texts (for instance, Laila Majnu ) at community gatherings like weddings. “In our play, we similarly reference the news of our times using nakal ,” explains Palawat. Of the dreamscape that must necessarily be evoked, he says, “We often dream of water in many different ways — someone might swim, someone might drown. The interpretations vary, of course.” In Kasumal Sapno , parallel themes of love and desire run amok creating a turf in which multiple ways of looking at the same ideas are established. The amorphousness of the play is finally gathered in the folds of Pyare’s final speech.
One work, many voices
The Ujaagar outing is one of many Midsummer.. adaptations that Mumbai audiences have been privy to. Chetan Datar’s Jungle Mein Mangal was a rambunctious gender-crossed exploration that was far from bowdlerized and arguably took the bard back to his common-person roots. Bijon Mondal’s Pyaar Pe War, whose various characters spoke in myriad Indian dialects, showed how music works well for the kitsch in Shakespeare, but also capture its melancholic soul. Atul Kumar’s Khwaab Sa used sexualised contemporary dance routines that left little to the imagination, but also featured a faux Rajasthani troupe as the mandali, in which an inspired Abhay Mahajan held sway as a hyperactive Bottom. These plays have sought to extricate Shakespeare from the colonial connotations of yore, perhaps by simply not placing his words in their original tongue on a pedestal but instead drawing out essences to retrofit his stories to compelling local contexts.
Kasumal Sapno will be staged at Prithvi Theatre, Juhu today and tomorrow, see bookmyshow.com for further details
