Spirits in Many Voices
A. H.
Arjun Raina and Monica Singh performed The Magic Hour (written and directed by Arjun Raina) and Arjun Raina performed A Terrible Beauty is Born (written and directed by Arjun Raina) on November 7 as part of the fortnight-long Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival held in Bangalore.
I’d like the spirits to come down during a performance, said Arjun Raina in answer to an audience question about his play A Terrible Beauty is Born. Why do you use video in your play? someone had asked. Isn’t theatre about human beings interacting with other human beings on a stage? We are magicians, Raina’s answer seemed to imply, and what is a mere video screen except another of the conjurer’s handkerchiefs? Don’t be misled by it; concentrate on the magic.
It was easy to concentrate on the magic, despite or maybe because of the fact that the performances were as much about the magicians themselves as the magic they stirred up. The Magic Hour was a delightful concatenation of Othello-cum-Iago in Kathakali costume, Mr. Shakespeare, old Hindi film music, Odissi dance, a character called Peter Pillai, and a half-Russian, half-Haryanvi Desdemona.
It began with seemingly straightforward intent: Kathakali performer Arjun Raina enacting bits of Othello. The lines seemed to acquire a tensile strength in his mouth, and with the wildly expressive dance of the face muscles, Othello’s simple reverence began to sound like some richly-wrought poem, its ironies glinting dangerously: ‘Rude am I in my speech, / And little blest with the soft phrase of peace;/ For since these arms of mine had seven years’ pith, / Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used/ Their dearest action in the tented field, / And little of this great world can I speak …’ But it’s no longer possible to just play Shakespeare, Raina very soon appears to imply, even if one does it in the language of Kathakali, even if one intersperses it with innovations like an Odissi dancer in a creepy mask, which suddenly introduced an impersonal, even sinister, element into the incredible grace of the form.
So we meet Mr. Peter Pillai, the Kathakali artist with the cute Malayali accent, who travels the world and is always asked in Britain and America – Mr. Pillai, how come you are speaking so good English? They don’t know that as a child, Mr. Pillai’s father taught him the alliterative ‘Peter Piper’ chant. We meet Monica Singh playing herself, telling us how growing up in Russia she was considered a ‘blackie’ but back in her father’s Haryana everyone knew that someone as fair as her would never have trouble finding a husband. She remembers bowing to her Russian grandmother’s Koran, yet learning to dance to love-songs invoking Krishna in her Odissi classes. This is a sort of colonial moment in the play, after which comes the post-colonial act of the empire striking back or the subaltern speaking up (or whatever it’s called!).
What nonsense Mr. Shakespeare is writing, says Mr. Pillai, after the particularly wrenching lines that accompany Othello’s stabbing of Desdemona: ‘O, balmy breath, that dost almost persuade/ Justice to break her sword! One more, one more;/be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, /And love thee after.’ The evil but white Iago is not killed on stage, while black and largely blameless Othello must die by his own hand. Why? Why does Mr. Shakespeare shrink from finishing off a white man on stage? Mr. Pillai would like to redress this but cannot. Raina redresses another injustice in return. As Othello is stabbing her, Desdemona asks to say one last prayer. Othello denies it to her and has been denying it to her for the last four hundred years. This time, however, Desdemona will be allowed her prayer, and she performs it in an extended and wonderful finale.
The second play of the evening moves the action to New York and Gurgaon but the anxieties are the same – our having to speak in voices we are good at imitating but unable to fully make our own, and the curse of always having to view ourselves from the outside, with the eyes of the West.
The story brings together an American (possibly black) woman named Elizabeth whose daughter has gone missing in the attacks on the World Trade Centre, and Ashok Mathur, a call centre employee wilting beneath the identity of a John Small. Raina’s portrayal of Elizabeth – relying entirely on oral performance – is an act of sustained brilliance. This is not merely about mimicking an American accent but conjuring up (yes, magic again) a whole life and a world-view to match it. Elizabeth is so recognizably American in idiom, in outlook, in moral sense, in grief, in humour, in taste (right down to her awe at how the leaves on trees outside her house turn a deep red in autumn) that in his playing of her, Raina, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces the play’s central premise – we live inside the skin of the West, whether we do it consciously and with irony, or unhappily and by force of circumstance. Ashok Mathur is, surprisingly, a more anonymous figure, although we do get to know through grainy video clips that he lives in old Delhi and stops speaking English as soon as he crosses Ajmeri Gate each morning on his way back from his night job. Ashok comes to Elizabeth’s help, and even though he does it in his role as John Small, one gathers that this act of kindness redeems him in some way, makes the charade he must live through seem less absurd.
The play is ostensibly written in criticism of call centres but its final resolution is more inspiring than angry. If a greater part of the story were centered on the call centre, there might have been room for going into the ramifications of sustaining an American accent for several hours a day (or night), while pretending to be someone one is not, not to mention the unpleasant job of alternately wheedling and threatening strangers to pay up what they owe the credit card company. As it is, the American side of the story takes over and it becomes a matter of great concern to us whether Elizabeth will find her daughter. In the face of this emergency Mathur’s ruminations on how the fan in his room sometimes seems to turn from a three-bladed Indian one to a four-bladed American one are somewhat inconsequential. This is ultimately a moving play, however, and though there are loose ends (a call-centre employee’s suicide remains strangely peripheral to the story), the spirits do come down.
A. H. is a writer and may be reached at jumhasan@yahoo.co.in.
back |
