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PHOTO: MURALI KUMAR K.

COMPREheNSIVE The performance is a refreshing experiment at many levels

In a plain white-t shirt and black trousers, Arka pulls out the violin, plays it and a stream of Shakespeare quotes gush out. “Music is the food of love…” he wistfully quotes from “Twelfth Night” and begins to read aloud the audience’s thoughts of whether this is some “bizarre, modern theatrical experiment” that they have paid Rs. 200 for and invites an audience-member to light a candle to consecrate the space.

The performance is a refreshing experiment on many levels – in invoking the effect of the sights and sounds of Elizabethan theatre during William Shakespeare’s time, in fusing the performer’s personal association with the exalted playwright and in articulating him and his works in modern-day happenings.

The ambience also creates the mood to go back and forth in time, in the dark lights used and the bright side spotlight which fell in different layers on Arka, surrounded by stark, black stage-curtains to give him an almost ghostly appearance.

The pronounced and emphasised British accent while Arka read out the Shakespeare’s works, the measured tones for lines for the famous plays, quoting the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s sonnet on the dramatist, and then engaging the audience to share what comes to mind when they think of Shakespeare, all reveal a deep love and regard for the “Bard of Avon”.

Lovingly handling the works, Arka puts on the brilliant jacket festooned with shells and mirrors, and gives contemporary examples to show how Shakespeare’s works would always be relevant. From the bloody assassination of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., being the pinnacle of Western thought, the gifting of the complete works from his grandmother to mother reading the date of receipt, their Bengali pronunciations and sensibilities, General Dyer’s Jallianwala Bagh, the infamous White House ‘threat’ “Either you’re with us, or against us…” Glasgow, the ‘middle-class multiplex reality’, their ‘nano-sized’ dreams, to the ‘collective shudder of middle-class morality’ in the wake of Chattisgarh incidents in conveniently naming the ‘accused’ from ‘Maoist, devil to born in nature without nurture’.

After these direct truths and references, he comes to the haunting lines of Shylock’s speech in “The Merchant of Venice” about the suffering based on racial intolerance and dehumanisation, and likens to topical injustice in India and outside – from the Islam, North-East, and the Palestinian question. He uses a black cloth and wraps it around his face and head, re-positions it skilfully to put on the garb of the concerned victim in question, borrowing theatre-activist Parnab Mukherjee’s style.

Then, Arko returns to the world of theatre and cinema and John Gielgud, one of the most famous Shakespearean actors of the 1960s and 50s and Arka discards his white t-shirt for a black shirt, dark sunglasses and ponders “how much there is of Shakespeare in us…?”

In a dramatic ending, where dark shadows fall on stage, the candles flickering, he slaps his feet on the wooden floor, reconstructs what his grandmother would have imagined the stereotypical couple Othello and Desdemona to be.

Again in an interesting, but slightly overdone attempt to engage the awkward audience, he talks of Shakespeare’s influence in Indian cinema – softly singing title tracks from “Omkara” and “Maqbool”. “Shreds and Patches” was an innovative and comprehensive whole-hearted performance to commemorate the birth and death anniversary of one of the greatest influences in literature and our lives leaving the audience with the fact that even today, there is a little bit of Shakespeare in each one of us.

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