From a swooning Romeo to a pistol-wielding Ram. From the angsty “To be or not to be”, to Gulzar’s spot on “Main rahoon ki main nahin”. From the boards of Stratford to the silver screen apart from games, graphic novels and more, Shakespeare is the ultimate rockstar. With numerous adaptations, re-visitings and re-tellings of his works—Vishal Bharadwaj’s Haider, being the latest, it is official. The Bard is in vogue. Again. And creative minds simply can’t seem to get enough of his works. To tweak or not to tweak—that is the question.
Talking about adapting Shakespeare, Bangalore-based filmmaker, Saad Khan says: “An adaptation is a perspective. When a director looks at a script, he doesn’t look at it with all the nuances a writer sees. Shakespeare gives you that space, and that leverage to experiment. His plays have so many layers and multiple perspectives. And intelligent filmmakers will capitalize on that. You have a lot of freedom to experiment”.
Sushma V. Murthy, Literature Professor from Christ University, also believes in the immense potential his plays have, and also his brilliant depictions of human relationships. She says, “Shakespeare explored every possible emotion and complexity in human relationships. He explored the dynamics and intricacies of all relationships, without typecasting the roles. So there is love, hate, jealousy and politics, and then there are nations and families in conflict. That’s why we keep going back to it — it is so relatable. There are so many Hamlets and King Lears among us.”
While watching adaptations of Shakespeare may be real fun for those of us on the other side of the stage, there’s a lot that goes behind the making of one, keeping the essence of the text in mind. There is the pernickety audience to be pleased as well. So how did Arjun Pathni, a theatre student in Christ University, go about directing an abridged version of As You Like It , with the original text, to cater to a largely teenage audience? He says, “Keeping the text original, we played around with the character’s personas a bit - for instance, the originally melancholic character of Jacques, we portrayed as being sarcastic. We also played around with the costumes — the characters wore 20th century costumes like suspenders and gowns, which went down well with the audience. Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed, and the beauty is that every character can be performed in multiple ways. It’s all in the interpretation”.
And interpretation was exactly what it was all about in director Prashanth Nair’s quirky, puppet-inspired re-visiting of Romeo and Juliet for stage with Romeo and Juliet: No Strings Attached . He says, “When I got into writing plays, the integral theme was dealing with choice and destiny. And the best part about Shakespeare is the scope of interpretation — I could adapt Romeo and Juliet to what I wanted to see in it, and went beyond the love story, to look at it as a story of choice and consequence”. And that’s just what he loved about Haider as well. “The fitting of Hamlet into the political and social landscape of Kashmir was a brilliant move. To me, Hamlet in Kashmir stood for more than just a vengeful prince, it stood for the entire lost generation of the youth of Kashmir. The choices that the director made to interpret the play, were very well imagined”.
With Shakespeare making waves 400 years after he wrote the plays, there’s no denying his brilliance, what with him ruling classrooms, stages and screens alike.
