Ranga Shankara: A decade of precious moments

Boy with a Suitcase

I LOVE THEATRE. As much as I love writing, reading, travelling  ~ or even breathing, I guess.

At school in Jaipur, I loved being on stage. Transforming into an 8-year-old boy in shorts at 15, playing Red Indians and cowboys, Minnie Mouse voice, silken ponytail, and all. Or being an ancient crone in a ghost story, with my hair powdered and streaked, my brow artfully etched with eye pencil.

But what I loved just as much was watching scenes come alive once the curtains went up.  Especially when Geoffrey and Laura Kendall’s Shakespearana troupe visited us at Maharani Gayatri Devi Girls’ Public School annually. Their dramatic opening line still lingers in my memory, words I took with me to Stratford-on-Avon and the recreated Globe theatre in London, ‘When Shakespeare played, the stage was bare, the throne of England was a chair in Shakespeare’s time…’

I felt so at ease while reviewing English theatre in Madras (not yet Chennai) during my first decade at Indian Express, especially brilliant productions at the Museum Theatre by directors and players like Vimal Bhagat, Ammu Matthew, Mithran Devanesan, and Nirupama Nityanandan.

When I relocated to Bangalore in May 1992, I went into mourning. As a viewer, I felt theatre during the Deccan Herald festival fell flat at Chowdiah Memorial Hall, so large, so impersonal, with acoustics more suited to music than theatre. Even Ravindra Kalakshetra, where I watched my first magical Ratan Thiyam play, seemed cold when compared to the Museum Theatre.

As if in answer to my prayers, Ranga Shankara was inaugurated in J.P. Nagar in October 2004. I have been in celebration mode ever since. The intimate space is perfect and heart-warming. So is the endearing warmth of its founder Arundhati Nag.

Now that Ranga Shankara turns ten in October 2014, I look back with wonder ~ and tenderness and incandescent joy. As a theatre buff, I would like to offer a personal tribute by sharing ten random, unforgettable moments through which I celebrate the first decade of Ranga Shankara. Here goes:

Arundhati Nag

~                ~  Listening to Arundhati Nag share the theatre’s raison d’etre in 2004, during an interview I did for The Hindu Sunday Magazine: “This theatre will strive to bring Karnataka to the centre stage of world theatre, as well as to bring world-class theatre to the common man in Karnataka.”   A dream achieved, quite irrefutably.

~              ~  The dazzling 35-day global inaugural festival from October- December 2004. It included Mysore-based Rangayana’s Kudiyattam-influenced Maya Sita Prasanga. And Habib Tanvir and his Naya Theatre’s spectacular Charan Das Chor in Chattisgarhi. And Imphal-based Chorus Repertory Theatre’s stunning presentation of Ratam Thiyam’s visually poetic Ritusamharam. I was enthused enough to attend 27 of the shows!

                 ~   November 2004. Lahore-based Ajoka Theatre’s Ek Thi Nani, in which theatre veterans Zohra Sehgal and Uzra Butt played out a plotline parallel to their own lives as sisters. Sehgal, then 92, had a fever when she stepped off her flight. But her never-say-die spirit saw her through to a standing ovation, bypassing coughs, pills and improvisations. I salute them both, onstage and off it. 

Measure for Measure

·                           ~ November 2005. Director Simon McBurney and his Euro-British Complicite theatre set the stage on fire with his interpretation of Measure for Measure as a take on the Bard for our time.  Electrifying both as drama and social commentary. I even interviewed McBurney between two back-to-back performances, the chai he requested brought to us by young playwright Swar Thounaojam. More recently, Swar’s plays have come to life at Ranga Shankara.   

·                          ~ June 2006. Germany-based Gracias Devaraj and Uwe Topmann in Nino D’Introna and Giocomo Raviccio’s ‘Robinson and Crusoe,’ a rollicking tale of two warring soldiers marooned together. Enacted in English and (yes!) gibberish, it had an audience of mainly schoolchildren rocking with laughter in their seats. As adults, hugging our knees on the steps and in the aisles, we joined in.   

·                        ~ April 2008. Under the Mangosteen Tree, directed by Rajiv Krishnan of Perch from Chennai. That was in its initial avatar as Sangathi Arinhya, a celebration of Malayalam writer Vaikom Mohammed Basheer’s life, personality and brilliant stories through a tight-knit, evocative production. In tandem with black-and-white images of Basheer’s life by Punaloor Rajan and a Moplah food festival at Anju’s in-house café.

·                    ~ June 2011. The stellar Indo-German premiere of Boy with a Suitcase, which I found rivetting enough to revisit thrice with different friends in tow. A Ranga Shankara collaboration with Mannheim’s Schnawwl Theatre, it captured dilemmas about culture, continents and identity brilliantly, especially through outstanding performances by M.D. Pallavi and Shrunga B.V.

·                  ~ March 2012: Director Sunil Shanbag’s Stories in a Song, his tribute to music as theatre (in collaboration with Shubha Mudgal and Aneesh Pradhan). Spanning seven theatrical anecdotes  (some apocryphal?), it encompassed notes from Sufi geet to Kajri, brilliantly held together by seasoned performers

·                  ~ October 2012: An outstanding global Shakespeare festival. Still luminous in memory thanks to plays like Atul Kumar’s Piya Bahurupiya (Twelfth Night) in nautanki style, the Tblisi-based Marjanishvili Theatre’s Rogort’s Genebot  (As You Like It) in Georgian (a play within a play, with backstage onstage and exquisite costumes), and even a Kiswahili rendition of The Merry Wives of Windsor, notable for its impeccable comic timing.

The Kitchen

·                 ~ August 2013. Roysten Abel’s totally experiential theatre in The Kitchen, inspired by Rumi’s kitchen at Konya in Turkey. Its highlights included a 22.5 ft. high set, 12 mizhavu drummers from Kerala live, and two actors cooking payasam from scratch onstage for the audience to taste when the last notes died down. Calling sight, sound, taste, smell and touch into play, we experienced theatre as a microcosm of life.

      *       *      *

          Thank you, Ranga Shankara for bringing the best of local and global theatre to me. For energizing me to dash from Cooke Town to J.P. Nagar every time you bring a good play to Bangalore. For tempting me with sabudana vada and akki rotti at Anju’s Café, so I am never late for a show.

         I had not imagined such a dream run when I first watched the staircase, the toilets, the café, the box-office and more fall into place over slow months in 2003- 2004.

          What can I wish you now, dear Arundhati and Team Ranga Shankara? Cheers to the next brilliant decade! And perhaps the next hundred years? 

          Bangalore loves you. So do I.

Theatre: Tim Supple's "A Midsummer Night's Dream'

Shakespeare's Indian summer

(Originally written in 2006)

What could possibly be new about yet another production of  A Midsummer Night's Dream, possibly one of Shakespeare's most tightly constructed plays? British director Tim Supple's interpretation at the height of the Indian summer in April 2006 provides an answer. He engages with almost every aspect he could possibly experiment with.

Touring New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata en route to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) Complete Works Festival at Stratford-on-Avon in June, Supple's rendition "creating tomorrow" through collaboration between the British Council and Hutch comes through as a spirited radical encounter that leaves no one cold. It proves to be more performance than potent poetry, enmeshed in the crossed strands between stardust magic and magnetic love play. 

 

Breaking away from the purist English tradition, the former Young Vic artistic director and RSC associate presents this first British Council commissioned theatre production through breakaway ideation, daring his audience to lose themselves in a theatrical thicket of questions. With a plot familiar to most urban Indians, Supple is on firm ground.

By the last scene of this dramatised dream at the open-air Buck's Theatre in Chennai, we want to scream aloud about basic issues. Will this production with an Indo-Sri Lankan cast work with an audience in Iceland or Indonesia? Why do we soon feel at home with Shakespearean poetry interwoven through seven languages? Do elements from bharatanatyam, kalaripayittu, malkhamb, therukoothu, bhangra and kathakali fuse into seamless body language that carries the narrative through?

As an audience, what we carry home to revisit are dramatic visual stimuli, enhanced by set and costume designer Sumant Jayakrishnan's inputs and brilliant lighting conceptualised by Zuleikha Chaudhari. Of a satin-clad stage space for a fairytale, swept away with a flourish to reveal bare red earth, seething with erotic encounters and bestiality between poetic interstices. Of a paper-clad wooden grid that has its surface ripped to shreds as characters leap through it in sexual pursuit, in playful chase, in fluent entrances and exits. Of silken swathes that entrance us as they fuse fluidly to form a hammock for the fairy queen's dream turned nightmare. Of agile characters suspended between heaven and earth on ropes, challenging life on intermediate planes. Of rich costumes donned and doffed as characters flit between identities. Of a crisscrossed mesh onstage that reflects the tangled lives at play.

Two years in the dreaming, rehearsed over seven weeks at the Adishakti theatre at Pondicherry, with a 22-member Indo-Sri Lankan cast from a shortlist of 60 auditioned in Mumbai last July, what pivots does this production rest on? Two obvious influences surge to mind. Peter Brook's 1970 Stratford staging with its trapezes and circus-like physicality, its players in primary colours, pared down to the essential Shakespeare. And Czech critic Jan Kott, who defined it as a "very powerful sexual play."

 As we watch the youthful rough and tumble onstage, each move imbued with forest grace, a tropical heat surges through the performance under the boughs, as night birds screech and call overhead. Real life adds a special soundtrack to Australia-born Devissaro's nuanced score, rendered live by N. Tiken Singh, Kaushik Dutta and D. Prakash. But one element remains a puzzle a lingam-like `singing stone' by a simulated water body in the foreground, perhaps a tool for Puck's spells, which chose to remain silent during the closing performance in Chennai.

For a play often interpreted, even by intelligences like Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, Utpal Dutt and Habib Tanvir, what makes Supple's rendition special? Perhaps he sums up its basic premise best in the production brochure: "I worked with an extraordinary range of artists. We had sessions where realistic actors worked with dancers and folk artists worked with experimental physical performers. We had musicians, singers and children. And most interesting of all, people acted in whatever language was most natural to them. Dialogues sprung up between English and Bengali, Hindi and Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil and Sinhalese."

Supple adds, "It was clear that our production had to be multilingual: to restrict ourselves to performers who worked in English would be to miss out on a wealth of different ways of making theatre and telling stories of seeing life and our trials of love, terror and social conflict that make up the canvas of the play. It would also be a lie. India is multilingual, Indian theatre is multilingual and whatever else a Shakespearean play might do, it should seek to reflect the time and place in which it is made with vivid honesty."

That's essentially what sets this production apart. Its honest South Asian multiculturalism. Has that led to an exotic, export-oriented experience? Are there neo-colonial notes underpinning the venture?

Not if we tune in to the cast and crew, who resonate with total theatre. Joy Fernandes, who plays an irresistible Bottom, recalls the physical rigour of rehearsals. The result? Impeccable body interfaces and pacing. Perfect tableaux. Surcharged emotional exchanges. Chandan Roy Sanyal, who dons Lysander's role, says, "I couldn't quite understand this character, until Tim explained one day: `He's a poet, who's in love with the idea of being in love.' After that, it was much easier. I enjoyed doing some of Shakespeare with the lyrical sweetness of Bengali."

Looking back, Supple remembers weekly sessions where the cast grappled with a key issue: `What is the play all about?'

With mixed feedback from Indian audiences, even those stunned by the production's integrity and aesthetics now wonder: how will it be received at the Swan Theatre at Stratford? Will purists be up in arms? Sprightly Yuki Ellias, who plays Hermia, is unequivocal in her opinion: "They will love us."

That's the quintessential challenge as Supple and his well-honed ensemble do a reality check on whether all the world's their stage.

(The Hindu Business Line, 2006)

Theatre: King Lear live at the Globe

The exterior of the Globe theatre

(Note: Originally published in 2001)


Shakespeare is no stranger to a child brought up in independent India, steeped as we are in the bard’s work, quoting lines off-the-cuff at every suitable (or unsuitable) occasion, wandering through his complete works as if through familiar terrain.

All my life, I’ve wondered what it would be like to watch a Shakespeare play at the Globe. Then, out of the blue, during the 27th British Council Cambridge Seminar 2001, there we were watching King Lear one wet July afternoon at that superbly reconstructed venue.

I pinched myself, and a few of my 50 seminar companions from 34 countries, to find out if it was true. I’d always imagined the Globe as a fairly posh theatre, acoustically sound, audience-friendly and perfect for the performer.

That afternoon, I realised how far from the truth I was. The rain poured indiscriminately on everyone in the yard, including the Fool who provided choric comments, perched atop a pole.

Our wooden benches on the ground floor of the three-tired seating arrangement, with ornate balusters, lacked backrests, and hired cushions for a pound each made the three-hour-15-minute rite of theatre fractionally more comfortable.

For the Globe we visited, a reconstruction of the 1599 original, was a dream come true for an American actor named Sam Wanamaker. On a trip to London in 1949, he was disappointed when he couldn’t trace the theatre. The only evidence that it once existed was a blackened bronze plaque on the wall of a brewery. That’s when Wanamaker vowed to build a fitting memorial to the Bard  ~ a replica of the Globe. Tragically, Wanamaker died in 1993, two years before his dream was realised.

The actors and the audience

The original Globe stood in the bustling commercial suburb of Southwark, on the south bank of Thames. When Shakespeare arrived in London from Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1580s, animal baiting was the most popular form of entertainment, evident in the thriving bull and bear rings. After the first Globe burnt to the ground in 1613 A.D., when a piece of wadding fired from a stage cannon shot into the roof burning the theatre down, the second theatre was given a tiled roof, and leading players were offered shares in it. That’s how William Shakespeare became a one-eighth owner of the Globe.

What was his theatre like? In its Wanamaker avatar, inaugurated on February 3, 2000, it has twenty sides and a diameter of 100 feet. Looking across the river to St. Paul’s cathedral, its mortared yard has a second surface, a mixture of hazelnut shells, cinders, sand and silt, all freely available industrial waste in Elizabethan times. In the 1990s, after each timber was marked, jointed and shaped, the theatre was assembled bay by bay. Unlike the first Globe that could hold 3,000 spectators, today’s reincarnation holds half that number to conform to fire safety regulations.

The new Globe is the first building in London since 1666 A.D. to have thatched roofing, though its water reeds have been chemically treated to retard burning.

But let’s wander back to the play. As Cordelia was banished from his sight by the vain King Lear, as Goneril and Regan won his favours with sweet words only to reveal their true colours soon after, as life in all its fury strutted across the boards, it was impossible not to note of the all-oak stage.

As with the original, skilled painters laboured over it to splotch, stain, vein and burnish it until we look at an illusion of stone, marble and semi-precious gems.

Cushions for sale!

Watchers all, we strove to focus our attention on the stage. But that was hard to do with pillars that blocked our view, both between bays and on the stage. As we craned our necks to update ourselves on the outrages perpetrated on Lear loyalist Gloucester by his illegitimate son Edmund, our backs creaked with the strain.
That’s when an American woman in the row in front, who has been a volunteer steward at the Globe during an earlier season, offers us a tip: Why don’t you go down to the yard, where the groundlings used to be, and stretch your legs a little?

It helped to look up at the stage, at the larger-than-life actors who declaimed their lines with elan, and feel a few drops of rain patter on our heads. All around stood hundreds of people, most clad in cheap rainproof gear, on their feet for the duration of the show.

That’s when I realised that umbrellas are banned in the yard, and so are folding chairs or shooting sticks. Of course, today’s crowd of five-pound watchers included students and tourists. But it was easy to imagine the boisterous, red-faced stinkards of the bard’s time, who ate and drank their way through the performance, interrupted it at will, broke into brawls, and hissed or clapped at the action. Unlike today’s clean-scrubbed faces, the Elizabethan groundlings rarely washed either themselves or their clothes.

Looking up from the yard, we gasped at the heavens above the stage space, with its midnight blue ceiling divided into panels by gilded ribs, each decorated by stars, sun, moon and the circle of the zodiac.

An ornate gate with sculpted figures from Shakespeare's plays

 
Its cloud-covered trapdoor cloaks the opening through which gods and goddesses can enter the human plane. Mercury and Apollo, the gods of eloquence, stand at either end, while the bare-breasted muses of tragedy and comedy gaze down from the balcony. We realised that the yard gave us an entirely new perspective on theatre at the Globe.

Back home, reliving the Globe experience, recent scholarship shares an amazing discovery  ~ the stage of the first theatre faced 48 degrees east of north, so that it was in continual shadow around the year. Why? Perhaps it was to conserve the richly dyed fabrics of the actors costumes, says one theatre source.

No matter what the answer, today’s Globe is a fitting tribute to Shakespeare from our time.