The Absurd Reality
I met Tathagata Chowdhury at the Art/Lit Festival at
ICG. He is a diehard actor and proprietor of a thriving English theatre company
based in Kolkatta. The theatre company is called ‘Threatician’ and it is a
remarkable platform for actors who want to live their dreams and experiment
prolifically. Their plays are staged in
the metros and they have plans of touring Asia and Europe for production and
staging of plays. Tathagata conducted a comprehensive 3-day theatre workshop at
the festival, quoting and showcasing legendary plays by Samuel Beckett and
Edward Albee. Listening to a thespian expound about classic plays which are
written by famous playwrights, performed by renowned actors and then savored by elite audiences on
Broadway , I felt privileged and enthralled and would like to share the
experience and their themes with my readers.
Previously we have talked of books and their film
adaptations in the same column here. Today we compare books and films with
another artistic form of expression ie theatre. Theatre they say is alive,
vibrant and palpable as films can never be. Films are technology at its best
and create an illusionary perfect world, whereas in theatre it’s like a live
wire with an audience glued to the stage which is real and there are no retakes
– you get it right once and that is it. Tathagata spoke about the elaborate
sets of Tennessee Williams which runs into pages of description, and how a
bench in Zoo Story and the door in Doll’s House become live strong characters
on their own – such is the power of a play.
Tathagata rendered an intense performance of ‘Mumbai
in a Zoo,’ an adaptation of ‘Zoo Story’ written by Edward Albee. It was a
monologue in which he skillfully portrayed two characters Jerry and Peter- the
protagonists of the original play. Classified under the genre of absurdist plays,
the Zoo Story is a seminal work by Edward Albee on the lack of contact between
human beings and the resultant apathy, indifference and destructiveness
implicit in its conformity. The sense of isolation in big cities, the sub-
human condition of people like Jerry, their struggle with the everyday
vicissitudes of life , are dramatically presented through Jerry , who does most of the talking in an
endeavor to establish a contact with a stranger , namely Peter sitting and
reading on a park bench .
The action
proceeds in the form of a conversation between the two characters. Peter is
reluctant to talk, his responses are monosyllabic. Cocooned in his life of
affluence with a comfortable income, an apartment and a cosy family, he
refrains from any kind of contact with Jerry, a commoner. Jerry on the other
hand is desperate for a human contact with Peter and relates his life story of
one night stands, his dingy one room apartment, the death of his adulterous
mother and drunken father, the gin-soaked landlady’s lust for him, his
heartrending endeavor to have a sense of relatedness with his surroundings,
even the dog in his neighborhood, who snarls and tries to bite him in spite of
being offered food. He frequently reverts to the refrain of having visited a
zoo in which he tried to study the behavior of animals and relationship of man
and animals. In the zoo, animals lived in cages, a metaphor for our society
wherein each human being lives within a boundary of hierarchy, culture, class,
and beliefs. These are the very barriers which break human contact and
communication and isolate us. Are they our narrow domestic walls of safety, or
lines of segregation, fear, hate and the other?
The opening encounter hesitant, slow-paced, monosyllabic, mounts
skillfully with the energetic flow of words, the rhythms changing to long confessional passages, until the
final violent physical possession of the park bench , when they face each other
and Jerry produces a knife and insults and goads Peter to pick it up in anger
and self - defense. The unexpected violent ending was changed by Tathagata in
the performance to a positive fare with the two having reached a wavelength
where they try and establish a contact and walk together some distance with
each other.
Another very
interesting and absurd study that Tathagata dwelled upon was ‘Breath’ by Samuel
Beckett. A thirty second play, to the point and perverse. It is a play which
has come in for a lot of critical attention since its conception and was
directed by Damien Hirst, later for a film project on Beckett’s works. You may
actually laugh the first time you watch it, now on a DVD too. The screen
brightens and you see trash littered all over. As the light increases in intensity, a 'faint brief cry' is
heard and then silence synchronized with a long breath in and out, held for
about five seconds. Then the light falls gradually to darkness, and the cry is
heard one final time. That’s the end period. You are struck by its brevity and
strangeness and you laugh for lack of comprehension. It takes a little time and
thought to decipher what you viewed. In
Beckett's text, the cry is described as an 'instant of recorded vagitus', a
Latin word describing the cry of a newborn infant. It is but a master’s symbolic
portrayal of life, fleeting and desolate, through the use of light, a cry and the
sound of a breath.
Absurdism
galore was cited by Tathagata through another study of Albee's play ‘The Goat,
Or Who Is Sylvia?’The synopsis would have you speculate that Albee was trying
to be funny by having the protagonist confess to his friend that he was in love
with a goat. On the contrary, it is a dark tragedy in which the protagonist
tries to express the inexpressible – his love for the she goat, over and above
his family, which questions our complacency and preordained notions of family,
sex and love. That passion cannot conform, be controlled, or directed to
socially acceptable trends. It is a must read for the masterful play of language
and the psychological study of love and relationships.
No comments:
Post a Comment