{"id":30684,"date":"2012-08-27T11:41:19","date_gmt":"2012-08-27T11:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.tehelka.com\/?p=30684"},"modified":"2012-08-27T11:41:19","modified_gmt":"2012-08-27T11:41:19","slug":"the-bard-goes-glocal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/the-bard-goes-glocal\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bard Goes Local"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
All the world<\/strong>\u2019s a stage The performance at The Globe Theatre<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nTHE STAGE:<\/strong>\u00a0Shakespeare\u2019s Globe Theatre, London. The scene: A house packed to the rafters, cheering along with the actors in freezing rain. The play: Shakespeare\u2019s\u00a0Twelfth Night.\u00a0The twist: Shakespeare\u2019s Twelfth Night in Hindi, as\u00a0Piya Behrupia,\u00a0with smatterings of Punjabi, Urdu and broken English.
\nThe Company Theatre (TCT), a Mumbai-based theatre group, recently staged\u00a0Piya Behrupiya<\/em>\u00a0in London as part of the World Shakespeare Festival. There were 37 plays from world over, such as a Swahili version of\u00a0The Merry Wives of Windsor\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Richard III<\/em>\u00a0in Mandarin. After shows in Mumbai and Delhi, the play will open the Rangshankara Festival in Bengaluru in October. Directed by Atul Kumar and translated by Amitosh Nagpal, it was commissioned by The Globe, as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. \u201cThey were clear that it was to be a translation, not an adaptation,\u201d says Kumar. Translation is what he, his cast and crew are calling it.
\nHowever, as the mannerisms and costumes echo Indian heartlands, one wonders how fine the line is between translation and adaptation. \u201cWe haven\u2019t changed names. The place is still Illyria; the characters are Orsino, Viola and Olivia. But the language and the setting have to blend. Cesario becomes \u2018Cejario\u2019 and Andrew Aguecheek, played by a Bengali actor, is Andrew dada,\u201d Kumar explains. It seemed to have worked for the crowd at the play\u2019s Delhi opening. Cesario\u2019s self-introduction to Olivia, \u201cI am from very good family. But disturbed personally,\u201d was accompanied by shouts of laughter and Olivia\u2019s hilarious odeCejario<\/em>\u00a0left people in splits.
\nThe stylistic influence is of\u00a0nautanki<\/em>\u00a0plays, where a travelling troupe puts up heavily improvised song and dance shows, sans sets.\u00a0Piya Behrupiya,<\/em>\u00a0too, has no sets. The Globe does not allow for those; something the crew has incorporated in their Indian shows. The acting and the music carry the play and the whistles in Kamani Auditorium stand testimony. The folk music is part self-composed, part songs from Punjab, Maharashtra and Bundelkhand. The highlight is the qawwali between Andrew dada and Sebastian (played by Nagpal) in which they hurl the basest of insults at each other to Sufi music. Gagan Dev Riar, the composer and the actor playing Sir Toby Belch, elaborates on the process. \u201cWe\u2019ve taken music from different regions in India. We\u2019ve changed lyrics to explain situations, and for some scenes we composed our own songs,\u201d he says. \u201cOnce we started selecting, we got a fair idea of the sound we wanted.\u201d
\nA two-and-a-half hour show with 18 songs must invite comparisons to Bollywood. \u201cOf course, it did,\u201d laughs Mantra Mugdh, who plays Andrew dada. \u201cBut then Bollywood owes everything to Shakespeare. This play, though, is very theatre-specific.\u201d As Toby constantly breaks the fourth wall, calling for \u201caudience interaction\u201d, Sebastian in his rib-tickling\u00a0sutradhar avatar<\/em>\u00a0tries to explain the plot, saying \u201cYeh daily<\/em>\u00a0soap\u00a0nahin hai,<\/em>Shakespeare\u00a0hai<\/em>\u00a0Shakespeare\u201d, Mugdh\u2019s statement rings true.
\nKumar calls his translator \u201can actor who writes\u201d. Nagpal\u2019s script carries off both the witty wordplay and sheer slapstick, that appeals differently to various audiences. \u201cPeople in London laughed in different places than the Indian audience. We didn\u2019t expect that. In fact, for one song everyone in The Globe raised their hands and swayed to the music. We felt like rockstars,\u201d recalls Mugdh. TCT reminds us why Shakespeare lives on in every culture \u2014 these are stories of people, power, love and sex.
\nAradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka.<\/em>
\naradhna@tehelka.com<\/a>
\n
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Piya Behrupiya, the Hindi translation of Twelfth Night, made London, Mumbai and Delhi laugh in all the right places, says Aradhna Wal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":30685,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[7051,7420,7421,7422,7423,7424,7425,7426,459,7427,7428],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30684"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}