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The Moor enters the heartland
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Roysten Abel's Othello is as much about theatre as it is about the Shakespeare tragedy
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PHOTO: S.R. RAGHUNATHAN
MANY LAYERS Othello — A Play in Black and White also hinted at the tussle between white man and native, between English and Indian languages, and, by extension, between urban English theatrewallahs and rural Indian language troupes.
Roysten Abel's production at Ranga Shankara last week captured the spirit of theatre in a way that his star-studded The Spirit of Anne Frank didn't in 2002. The latter felt more like television, with actors wearing clip-on mikes and sitting inside a limited, framed, rectangular space most of the time. Othello — A Play in Black and White, on the other hand, was full of dramatic energy. It is Abel's earliest play, which he has been fine-tuning over the years, and it is as much a play about theatre as it is about the Shakespeare tragedy.
The play's final speech (comprising lines from other Shakespeare plays including King Lear) begins by quoting the three witches in Macbeth: "Fair is foul and foul is fair." It points to the ambiguity and double meaning embedded in Abel's play. As in the Hollywood version of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, where the on-screen emotions of the lead actors (Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep) spill over into their personal lives, the Bard's lines often echo the actors' offstage reality.
Twin illusion
The audience witnesses what appears to be a group of actors rehearsing a play — a trick that Abel has got a bit too fond of, for he used it in his later plays as well. The actors retain their first names so that, for example, Kirsten Jain plays Kirsten the actor as well as Desdemona. (This kind of twin illusion prevailed also in Abel's Romeo and Juliet in Technicolour.) The audience is led to believe that Barry, Kirsten, Vivek and Dilip are members of a company that has been staging Othello for years, and an intruder called Roysten Abel now wants them to do a Kathakali version of it. What's worse, he starts "seeing this play totally upside down" and casts Barry, who usually plays Othello, as Iago, and Adil, a young stagehand who helps in blocking the sets, as Othello.
The lines between role and actor-self are effectively blurred. Just after Abel has finalised his cast, Barry launches into Iago's "Oh villainous!" which sounds suspiciously like an attack on Abel's unpopular decision. He starts saying "I have looked upon the world for four times seven years... " which is Iago's age, and remembering his own, adds "more like nine times seven"! When a jealous Adil thinks Kirsten and Dilip are lovers, the scene he does with Barry (as Othello asking Iago for proof of his wife's infidelity) turns deadly serious. One begins to wonder, as the play progresses, whether Barry is scheming like Iago to get back his original role from Adil (some twist that would have been!) but in the end, Barry's turns out to be the only voice in support of Adil. He advises the young actor to channel his personal emotions into the play.
An important facet of the play is the "black and white" of the title. It doesn't merely refer to the all-black costumes and Abel's ostentatious black-and-white sneakers, but to the tussle between white man and native, between English and Indian languages, and, by extension, between urban English theatrewallahs and rural Indian language troupes. (The joke about Adil being an "NSD type" went down well.) When Abel explains to Adil that they are both "outsiders" because they're not members of the company, one doesn't miss the undercurrent: the incestuous English-speaking company does not want to be tainted by native influences. Vivek sneers at the Hindi-speaking Adil and speaks behind Abel's back about his use of Kathakali, while Barry swears that the play will be done only in English.
And what a naked demonstration there was of this very attitude among the audience! The brown sahibs and madams unwittingly sniggered along with Vivek when Adil spoke Othello's lines — first in Hindi, and then, encouraged by Abel's Malayalam translation of "The Turk with a most mighty preparation makes for Cyprus", in a glorious burst of Assamese. The audience was not aware that one of the greatest actors to play Othello was the late 19th Century actor Tomasso Salvini who performed in Italian even when in England or the U.S., with the rest of the company speaking English. Shakespearean critic Sylvan Barnet tells us that Salvini was an Othello who was deeply moving as well as terrifying; he "seized Iago by the throat and hurled him to the floor and put his foot on Iago's neck". This was precisely what Adil did too.
Demonstrating the dangers
The play demonstrates the dangers of actors identifying too closely with their characters without retaining the necessary distance; Othello's jealous fury when he confronts Desdemona in Act IV results in Adil hurting Kirsten. In contrast, the final murder is played with stylised Kathakali movements that rob the scene of emotion. Othello doesn't kill Desdemona, for Adil drowns his personal demon of jealousy in a flood of tears.
Abel drew consistent performances from his actors, from the redoubtable Barry John to the relatively less experienced Dilip Shankar as Cassio. Vivek Mansukhani was perfect as the snooty Vivek, the egoistic actor whose ambitions are thwarted. Despite a fiery Adil Hussein, when the play drew to a close with Barry's final speech, one was left with the impression that age and experience do have the last word.
C.K. MEENA
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