Meta-theatre is one of the stage’s great preoccupations. A play about a play, with each degree of removal, can peel away layers that strikingly bring underlying human conflicts into sharp relief. An actor playing another actor who plays a character, this iteration brings us levels of motivation and morality all within the same body. This was perhaps most expansively realised in the conundrum that is Charlie Kaufman’s film, Synecdoche New York , in which a visionary theatre director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) creates a veritable replica of a city inside a humongous warehouse as part of a new immersive theatre experience. A ‘synecdoche’ is a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something or vice versa. Kaufman’s universe, is a hyper-real New York in which reality can no longer be distinguished from make-believe, and the intermingling of fact and fiction is seamless and absolute.
Theatre-makers have often used ‘the play within the play’ for comic high jinks. In Rajat Kapoor’s Hamlet The Clown Prince , clowns perform the Shakespearean tragedy. They come up with tropes and tics, making things up as they go along, pulling the strings of performance with lip-smacking glee.The timing is impeccable, giving the proceedings the quality of madness, to which there always seems to be a well-etched method. The seasoned performers bring with them the baggage of effortlessly passing off the tried-and-tested as something unrehearsed and free-form. Its lead actor, Atul Kumar, has often staged Noises Off , a 1982 play by the English playwright Michael Frayn, which takes us to the backstage of a production of a somewhat nondescript farce. The shenanigans ‘behind’ the performance are much more riveting, feeding Noises Off with a supply of comic dysfunction good for several gags and improvised set-pieces.
A class apart
As I have frequently observed, Hindi playwrights appear to thrive in a meta-universe in which the creative soul is placed at the centre of a narrative. There is always a play whirring in the backdrop, and egos and opinions are tossed about in an ubiquitous green room. The irony of creation, or of being a creator, is something that makers seem to be constantly over-awed by, which is why meta-theatre of this kind can be frequently indulgent.
When a director picks up a play that is already a long-standing cultural artefact, an altogether different quality of performance is accomplished. Sunil Shanbag’s S*x, M*rality and Cens*rship , is based on the censorship woes faced by the Tendulkar classic, Sakharam Binder, in the 1970s, and includes several scenes from the play. The actors who perform them are never shown backstage, although we are kept acquainted with the characters (or sutradhars) who appear to be watching the performance alongside us. Thus Shanbag can take on Tendulkar’s themes head-on, and without the distraction of multiple meta-levels playing into his representation and interpretation of a complex text. In the process, the performances of Nagesh Bhosle as Sakharam, and Geetanjali Kulkarni and Rajashree Sawant Wad as his women, acquire the allure of an authentic and unvarnished truth. The trope of ‘the play within the play’ is only really visible during a staging of Sakharam Binder for a High Court judge who must adjudicate on the matter of its banning, and in the quick recreation of the history of sanitisation in theatre across eras.
Balancing act
In Abhishek Majumdar’s Kaumudi , the ‘play within the play’ becomes a site of catharsis, where a saga of filial disaffection involving the lead actors, Satyasheel (Kumud Mishra) and Paritosh (Sandeep Shikhar), who happen to be father and estranged son, reaches its apotheosis. Of course, we are reminded beforehand of Satyasheel’s virtuosity as a demigod who delivers tour-de-forces each evening to delirious audiences. As expected, the play within acquires the broad brushes that Majumdar had kept aside till then. The audience of that production, invisible to us, are more attuned to loud melodrama and farce (that Kaumudi almost appears to lampoon), responding on cue with canned laughter. For us, the audience ‘outside’, a suspension of disbelief is in order as we wait for Satyasheel to attain that certain kind of gravitas, described so evocatively by his acolytes. Satyasheel, and by extension, Mishra, as Eklavya’s ghost seems entirely in character. Under the harsh glare of the arc lights, the actor is much more in a scenery-chewing element (in all senses of the term). Pitted opposite him, as Abhimanyu, is the elegant Paritosh. Satyasheel, gradually losing his eyesight, is soon to be replaced by his son in the play. A kind of communion is achieved on stage. Paritosh’s uppity self gives away to Abhimanyu’s pliancy, and Satyasheel’s floundering anxiety makes way for the stature of Eklavya.
In one scene, the pain is clearly palpable when they both break character, while still keeping the crowd in hand, even if the asides cast a knowing look at the running of the theatre company itself. Kaumudi ’s long running time doesn’t affect a similar journey for its audience. The emotional vicissitudes are presciently sign-posted in this text-driven venture, but we cannot quite dip into a well of selfsame sentiment ourselves, even if predisposed to do so by our own expectations of where the material must necessarily take us. That is, of course, the distance between script and execution. The tightrope that the play walks nonetheless achieves a blurring of lines between the whimsical and the substantive that is the hallmark of good meta theatre.
Hamlet The Clown Prince will be staged on July 19 and 20 at Prithvi Theatre. Visit bookmyshow.com for moredetails.
