Asian Interventions in Global Shakespeare

'All the World's His Stage'

Poonam Trivedi, Paromita Chakravarti, Ted Motohashi, Poonam Trivedi, Paromita Chakravarti, Ted Motohashi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000214314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume critically analyses and theorises Asian interventions in the expanding phenomenon of Global Shakespeare. It interrogates Shakespeare's 'universality' from Asian perspectives: how this has been modified or even replaced by the 'global bard' as a recognisable brand, and how Asian Shakespeares have contributed to or subverted this process by both facilitating the worldwide dissemination of the bard's plays and challenging and resisting the very templates through which they become globally legible. Critically acclaimed Asian productions have prominently figured at premier Western festivals, and popular Asian appropriations like Bollywood, manga and anime have created new kinds of globally accessible Shakespeare.

Essays in this collection engage with the emergent critical issues: the efficacy of definitions of the 'local', 'global', 'transnational' and 'cosmopolitan' and of the liminalities and mobilities in between. They further examine the politics of 'West' and 'East', the evolving markers of the 'Asian' and the equation of the 'glocal' with the 'Asian'; they attend to performance and archiving protocols and bring the current debates on translation, appropriation, and world literature to speak to the concerns of global and transnational Shakespeare. These investigations analyse recent innovative Asian theatre productions, popular cinematic and manga appropriations and the increasing presence of Shakespeare in the Asian digital sphere. They provide an Asian standpoint and lens in rereading the processes of cultural globalisation and the mobilisation of Shakespeare.

PART I
The Asian ‘Global’ and Its Discontents

1
MAKING MEANING BETWEEN THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL

Performing Shakespeare in India Today

Poonam Trivedi

The Asian Shakespeare Association’s biennial conference in Delhi in December 2016, entitled ‘All the World’s His Stage: Shakespeare Today’, scheduled three very different stage performances: Hamlet, I Don’t Like It/As You Like It and Dying to Succeed. Performed in a Hindi-Urdu translation, Hamlet took its interpretative clue from a close engagement with the text and eschewed any conscious local colour. The second production, on the other hand, was a complete contrast: a parodic take on As You Like It. It was performed in English to hilarious effect. It has become one of the more successful recent versions of Shakespeare playing to packed houses all around the country for over four years. The third was an experimental solo piece by a female actor – in English, Hindi and Marathi – which updated characters and scenes from several plays to speak to young people’s concerns today.

Although these three productions were substantially different to each other, together they are symptomatic of the current staging practices in India which are tweaking and modifying both the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ in significant ways. They are alike in the implications of their performative praxis, in that the experimentations of all three impel a reconsideration of the ‘national’, the ‘ethnic’, the ‘transnational’ and their intermeshing with these. They foreground the incipient politics of performing an ‘Indianness’, their reception forming discursive sites harnessing the fluidities and tensions of a rapidly changing country and economy. This essay will examine these productions with particular attention to their languages – both linguistic and performative – and their evolving, sliding significances in the Indian context to argue that Shakespeare in India today makes meaning in ‘between’ the reified notions of the local and the global, and through the shifting positions thereof.

The local and the global, in the performative sphere, have been defined and discussed copiously, almost to the point of exhaustion. Discussion of Shakespeare in performance, though tacitly responsive to the debates in theatre and performance studies, largely carves its own track, and Global Shakespeare today can mean anything from the acknowledged and increasing presence of Shakespeare in almost all countries of the world, to adaptation with a transnational flavour and accessibility, to a brand of performance that transports and accommodates itself to global tastes and audiences and to mega theatre, like the Lion King, which is outsourced to franchise productions over the world. These perspectives are usually held as binaries of the local, which has been less theorised, but most often held as site specific, historical and contextual. ¹ These definitions carry their ideological and political freight too, the global usually being valorised as liberated, transnational, postmodern and more democratic, while the local, more often than not, is challenged as narrow, native and parochial. From another point of view, the global signifies not a ‘globelectically’ level playing field but the ‘rest of the world’, excluding the West, seen in the many Global Shakespeare courses and archives on offer.

Before the current ‘global’ buzz caught on, other preceding critical formations such as the intercultural and multicultural, and the ‘glocal’ and the trans-national, which seem to persist simultaneously, have also impacted Shakespeare performance and reception. However, it is the theatre festivals of 2012 – on the occasion of the London Olympics, the Globe to Globe in London and the World Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-upon-Avon – that have stamped a seal on the idea of Global Shakespeare, of 37 plays from as many countries, in as many languages and styles, performing at the originating sites of Shakespeare, as the sign of the ‘global’. A Globe Hamlet was also organised to tour 197 countries, which was not just the world coming to the Globe but the Globe performing to the world. Shakespeare became multi-lexical, multi-spectated and multi-sited. These events followed by the two anniversaries of the 450th birth (2014) and 400th death (2016) have generated considerable writing consolidating the concept of Global Shakespeare. What earlier was considered Shakespeare and/at the Globe has now collapsed into a portmanteau concept of Global Shakespeare. While much of the reviewing and critical assessment was celebratory of the extraordinary event, reservations were also sounded, gingerly to begin with, but later elaborated into theoretical positions. In this plethora of unconventional and alternative Shakespeare performances, two major critical issues pertinent to our purpose emerged – of language and of spectatorship – both of which modify and impel a rethink of the idea of the global with shades of the local.

The two Shakespeare anniversary years, 2014 and 2016, did not, unlike 1964, produce any major academic fanfare in India. Although some conferences and subsequent publications in a few universities did mark the occasion, there were no big Shakespeare festivals or celebratory events organised. Some theatre productions, both professional and amateur, however, did accumulatively create a certain Shakespeare buzz. Two productions, of Twelfth Night and All’s Well That Ends Well, commissioned by the Globe, London, for their G2G festival gave, for the first time, an international recognition to contemporary Indian theatre and its Shakespearean redactions. The crossover success of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare films Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006) and Haider (2014) earlier in the decade had reignited a performative interest in Shakespeare, and the anniversaries inspired several notable stage productions, including those under review. Ratan Thiyam’s Macbeth (2014), Richard III (2015), two other versions of Hamlet (2016), one Othello (2016) and a Comedy of Errors (2016) were produced just in Delhi, not to mention other metropolitan centres like Kolkata and Mumbai. A spate of films too emerged: Hrid Majharey (Othello, 2014), We Too Have Our Othellos (Othello, 2014), Double Di Trouble (The Comedy of Errors, 2014), Arshinagar (Romeo and Juliet, 2015), Hemanta (Hamlet, 2016), Veeram (Macbeth, 2016), Natsamrat (King Lear, 2016) and Sairat (Romeo and Juliet, 2016). A feast of styles and languages was witnessed as different localities, sites and communities performed Shakespeare to express themselves and, in the process, stretch and challenge notions of a stereotypical ‘Indianness’ or even ‘Bollywoodness’.

We may look at a few of these to show how they are representative of the larger local tendencies. Of these, Twelfth Night and All’s Well that Ends Well did achieve a ‘global’ exposure, being performed at the London Festival. Twelfth Night has since toured Southeast Asia, Australia and the United States too, while the transnational success of Vishal Bhardwaj’s films marked a global impact. Yet all these theatre performances and most films of Shakespeare were designed for home consumption; if they have garnered international appreciation that is a bonus. Since most of the other stage and even film productions did not travel, they raise questions about the value of the very local, which stays closely tied to its locality. What is their place in the larger repertoire of Shakespeare worldwide? While the variety of these local Shakespeares, their styles and experimentations testify to the range of the local, they also show that there is no one singular model of ‘Indianness’ or a national consensus or taste which can explain this diversity. In the developing discourse on Global Shakespeare, with its drift towards emphasising collaborative transnationality, or trans-legibility, beyond the national space, “unmarking its origins”, discursive models like “Shakespeare in India” are held to be an outmoded “unproductive shorthand”, ² provoking fundamental questions about whether the global can exist and flourish without its contextual base. And if it de-territorialises, it must of necessity re-territorialise: for example the abiding stories of the touring Global Hamlet are chiefly of its very local and at times singular inflections and receptions. Until there is a wider and more probing analysis of the ‘local’, its demands, compulsions and ramifications, the global too is bound to remain contested.

Linguistic Local

The Hamlet, in a Hindi-Urdu translation, directed by the seasoned theatre director K. Madavane, and first performed in September 2016, was produced for the Shree Ram Theatre Repertory in New Delhi. The choice of Hamlet was unusual and significant in its locationary context because curiously directors have fought shy of staging this play in Hindi during the last few decades, preferring the other tragedies. The production edited the play to two hours (without a break), but kept close to the original, retaining names, plot and characters who were performed naturalistically, clad in a mix of historical and modern Western costumes. Madavane interpreted the play and its eponymous character as depicting the condition of a confused young man, who is called away from his studies because his father dies but is not given his patrimony, the charge of the throne, whose mother does not seem to support him and who does not know who his friends are – a state suggestive of the condition of the young of today. Hamlet wore jeans and black leather jacket to underline this equation with the modern moment (“A New Interpretation of Hamlet. In leather jacket and boots” headlined the Hindustan Times review, 10 Sept. 2016). As the director said about his choice to do Hamlet: “the play chose me”. ³

In the trendy appropriative climate of today, the decision to be faithful to the text without adaptive changes, but perform in translation, may be seen as radical and postcolonial (Shakespeare had begun being performed in translation in India from 1852 onwards, and Hamlet from 1854). ⁴ Rustom Bharucha, a well-known theatre critic who witnessed this show, expressed surprise, noting that “Shakespeare’s text was present”. ⁵ Yet being voiced in Hindi-Urdu released more immediate contemporising political inflexions and shifts of meaning. The translation, largely from the published version by Amrit Rai with some intermix from Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s verse translation, both of which were close to the original, provided an instant local connect as opposed to the Shakespearean language, which for many remains a schooled pleasure.

The international audience comprising 80 delegates from 19 countries for this commissioned show were equally engrossed because the performative language and staging delved into the play in an innovative manner. It adopted a sparse staging style in which huge wooden boxes/blocks, of 8×3 feet dimensions, six vertical and one horizontal, functioned as the set, the props and the defining presence, at times confusing for the local audience. The production, however, opened with these blocks, painted in differing shades of grey – symbolic of the confusions and ambiguities which drench the play – arrayed around the stage in a semi-circle, representing the walls of Elsinore castle and all that keeps the characters locked in. Not just walls, they also functioned as seats, bed and the grave, but when pushed, pulled, stood up or laid horizontal, they became key mobilisers of the physical and emotional action and mood. During rehearsals, each actor had his particular box with which he/she practised how to activate the burdens of the play. “For me, the set is an actor too”, said Madavane. The production presented a strong visuality: a play of light and shadows spliced by the shifting blocks and their changing colours heightened the psychic movements, creating a noir mood tense with suspicion. With no blackouts, but with lights dimmed for change of scene, a fluid movement was maintained. The response of Mike Ingham, a conference delegate from Hong Kong, was:

I loved the ensemble work and felt that it was a very kinaesthetic production which increased its accessibility to any non-Hindi speaking spectators. It underlined for me the absolutely transnational character and potential of Shakespeare’s play, and the intense theatricality...