Ranvir Shah, The Hindu

April 19, 2014

Almost every language theatre group in India has made Shakespeare its own.

There is a full moon in the night sky. In the small pavilion of granite, a human statue has come to life and a celebrating chorus of happiness surrounds us. A young boy accompanied by a stray dog walks down the path to join the cast of A Winter’s Tale as they take a standing ovation. It is late at night and the cast, like the audience, are bathed in moonlight falling off their all-white costumes. Nature has played along and a few white lotuses are blooming in the small pond below. The exquisiteness of the moment overtakes us all.

This then is the ephemeral magic of Shakespeare. This scene was the last evening of the Hamara Shakespeare festival; the setting was the lily pond at Kalakshetra, Chennai, called the Padma Pushkarni. Played in Urdu and Hindi with English, the young cast made the audience move with them as the scenes unfolded — from sitting around at the start to festivities under the banyan tree and the final scene.

How do we come to make Shakespeare ours? A colonial construct that we inherited in our educational system, several generations of Indians learn him at school often wondering about the relevance of his language, metre and rhythm. What truly stays in adulthood from all of this is the memory of a good story well told. The plot is almost always layered, several sub-plots occur, and there are always the universal tropes of love, lust, jealousy, power, the workings of fate and so on — in short, all of the kaleidoscope that makes up the emotional interior landscape of humans across cultures.     Read Full Story

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