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Of jest just so infinite

MESSAGE TOO A scene from “Hamlet”.

“Hamlet – the Clown Prince”, would have left Shakespeare chuckling into his lace handkerchief. Produced by The Company Theatre and directed by Rajat Kapoor it packs the best of theatre into an hour and 40 minutes. It never stoops to the slapstick and rises to wit instead. It never substitutes acting with buffoonery. While English is at times replaced by gibberish, yet the play remains Shakespearean in essence, if not in form and text.

The clown always played an important role in most of Shakespeare’s plays. Classified as the rustics or the groundlings they were the most honest characters. Benefiting from their marginal position, they often acted as the mediators between the actors and the audience.

Taking this Shakespearean device further, Kapoor stages an entire play through clowns’ eyes. The clowns in this performance are entertaining and enlightening because they are completely honest. They acknowledge the audience and converse with them directly. They joke about the chaos that is Delhi, where it is impossible to find parking and where everything is in circles. They flirt with the audience but also mock them when they seem in rapt attention.

What is truly remarkable about “Hamlet – the Clown Prince”, is that it breaks and constructs the “fourth wall” (the division between audience and actors) with quicksilver speed. The play alternates between episodes where the actors actually talk to the audience and episodes where the audience is carried away in the magic of theatre. So, in one instant Queen Gertrude will ask for an audience member’s phone number. In another instant, the audience will be nearly reduced to tears over Ophelia’s drowning because of the poignancy with which it is enacted. The audience thus goes on a rollercoaster of believing and non-believing.

While searching for the essence of “Hamlet”, the clowns make the play relevant. Raising issues of freedom and procrastination, Hamlet seems the quintessential 21st Century man. Hamlet’s epic “To be or not to be” soliloquy is distilled into a clown’s gibe at Hamlet. “Oh…I can’t act. I’m the king of procrastination”. Hamlet is suddenly no longer an Elizabethan creation but instead he is all of us.

All six actors – Atul Kumar, Rachel D’ Souza, Neil Bhoopalam, Puja Sarup, Namit Das and Sujay Saple — were thoroughly entertaining. They converted to burlesque characters in look, action and soul with shocking authenticity. Hamlet’s elegy for Yorick, his old jester, applies to the cast, “of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy”. Neil who played King Claudius and Fido was so funny that one wished one could watch repeated re-runs of his imitations. The script has some sparkling lines and is uniformly humorous. But there are portions in the middle that seem to drag and cutting it by about ten minutes, will make it more tight.

“Hamlet – the Clown Prince”, won over the jury at Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards. Having been staged at Kamani Auditorium as part of META, it won awards for The Best Play, Best Director, Best Actor Male (Atul Kumar) and Best Supporting Actress (Puja Sarup). The other big award winner was Ram Gopal Bajaj’s “Layla Manjun” for Best Actor Female (Laxmi Rawat), Best Supporting Actor (Banwari Taneja) and Best Original Script (Ismail Choonara and Sabir Irshad Usmani).

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