 Playwright: William Shakespeare
Director: Rajat Kapoor
Cast: Atul Kumar, Neil Bhoopalam, Puja Sarup, Sujay Saple, Namit Das, Rachel D’Souza
Language: English, Gibberish
Theatre Group: Cinematograph
Clowning around via gibberish & gestures!
In 1969, William Willeford made the suggestion that Shakespeare’s character, Hamlet, was actually one of his fools. A few decades later, Cinematograph offers us Hamlet, The Clown Prince where not only the title character but all the characters are clowns.
Known for clowning around, Rajat Kapoor and Atul Kumar reincarnate the Bard’s classic with piquancy. In this pastiche, the clowns from The Clown Theatre Company prepare to stage The Tragedy of Hamlet. Gibberish and kinesics form the crux of a side-splitting script. Wit, intellectual repartee, ignorant ribaldry, double entendres and all forms of comic surprise evoke the spectator’s mirth so often that audience laughter and applause are almost a part of the play’s texture.
The performances are par excellence. Atul Kumar as Soso is anything but so-so – mouthing incomprehensible words and looking like a clown, yet Hamlet in essence. Neil Bhoopalam (Fido, Claudius and the ghost of the dead king) is a flexible funny bone. He overwhelms with his enthusiastic antics and charades, and breaks into a jig at the tilt of a hat. Namit Das is superlative – match-referee, chase commentator, quivering Polonius, operatic singer; he pulls them off with equal dash. The reigning queen, however, is Puja Sarup. She wears with squealing charm, Buozo’s not-so-existential concerns of love, booze, ugliness, fat and pom-poming.
Kapoor’s handiwork is brilliant. The action on stage exists at several levels and wherever you set your eye there is ongoing movement. Time and again the spectator is pulled into a tragic insert, which is quickly truncated with a voraciously comic line. Not only does this leave scope for ironic interplay, but also disallows a split second of dullness.
The play is classically Postmodern. However, beneath this carnivalesque chorus is the morbid Renaissance theme of memento mori – remember you must die.
All plays end in blackouts, but few like Hamlet, The Clown Prince close to deafening applause and cries of encore.
Asma Ladha
Asma holds a Master's Degree in English Literature and Applied Linguistics. She is an applied linguist, lecturer, freelance critic, research student and poet.
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