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Charged performances

Neelam Mansingh’s The Suit was intimate, expressive, and real

Photo: Bhagya Prakash K.

Courtroom Mansingh distorts stage space and time for a complex narrative

The man comes home unexpectedly and finds his wife in bed with another man who makes a hurried exit. It’s that joke we have all heard before in its many variations. In this case, the other man leaves his grey suit behind.

At the Ranga Shankara Festival, director Neelam Mansingh and her group – The Company, Chandigarh – put this little plot into a familiar Indian middle-class setting and grow on it an experience of pure theatre — intimate, expressive, charged and real. Based on a short piece written by South African writer Can Themba in which the offended husband, “forces the woman to treat the abandoned suit as an honoured guest, accompanying them even on walks and at the dinner table,” The Suit becomes the presence — of betrayal, guilt, injury and obsession.
Paring down

In Neelam Mansingh’s adaptation, dramatised by Surjit Patar, the tortured relationship is pared down to such a basic, molecular level that the tension between the two principal characters would be the same if they were of different castes, classes or cultures. It matters nothing that the dialogue is Punjabi-English: it wouldn’t, anywhere in the world this play travels.

The husband, Bunty (Vajinder Bharadwaj), is young, caring and very endearing, obviously in love with his wife, Mina (Ramanjit Kaur). He wakes up on a cool and cloudy morning, makes his morning tea, reads his morning paper on the little sit-out or balcony and brings a cup to the sleeping Mina on the mattress. She in turn runs about the house to get him ready to leave for work — giving him a quick wash in the cosy little bathroom, rubbing his hair dry, packing his lunch dabba. Who can tell whether she means it or wants to get him out of the house quickly? As Bunty rides pillion with friend Pappaji, Mina transforms at home into the languid lover, lets her hair down, literally, and becomes the sex kitten.

Ironically, a standard joke about the cuckold shared between the men brings Bunty home to discovery. In his uncontrollable nausea, he asks, “What makes a woman like her want to experiment with adultery?” Mina doesn’t know (who knows?) and Mansingh won’t tell. Mortified, she submits to her natural sense of guilt and Bunty’s inexorable sense of injury. Until Neelam Mansingh brings it to a point where it must either snap or burn down.

As it turns out, Mansingh gets it to snap, but outside the known frameworks of political and sociological clichés. In her director’s note, she says: “In my production, I would say outright, the play is apolitical, rather, it is not intentionally political and thus, in appearance at least, lacking in agenda... While reading the story I felt the anger of the characters, their sense of being betrayed by their own natures. Theatre then becomes a courtroom in which we judge ourselves and our mysteries.”

The space is charged at the very outset as the musician walks around the mattress casting a spell. Mansingh, with a seemingly shabby set, ideal for domestic squalor, distorts stage space and time for a complex narrative in which there is simultaneous action in two spaces and uses the setting for multiple locations. She gets her actors — Kaur and Bhardwaj — and Hitender Kumar, who plays all the other characters, to extend the possibilities of the theatrical idiom with minimal music, lights and sets. They perform with amazing vigour and grace.
Tragedy in formal register

The Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival opened with a grand concert of possibilities: “Andha Yug”, written in Hindi by Dharamvir Bharati and an acknowledged classic of modern Indian drama, and directed by Ratan Thiyam, internationally acclaimed and once described by the New York Times as ‘a genius.’

Compelling performances, fantastic stage energy and haunting music and choreography, all of which have been associated over the years with the director and his talented Chorus Repertory Theatre of Imphal, Manipur, were delivered as promised. But there was something disturbingly disconnected. That it was in Manipuri was, of course, a simple enough obstruction. But Thiyam’s evident skills in going beyond the verbal and an average Indian’s familiarity with epic content combined to overcome that one as effectively as one possibly could with an original text so severe in its rhetoric.

The core issue, however, is with the very presentation of Tragedy: Thiyam’s players are so earnest, so without distance, , even to the point of becoming lurid, that it is hard to feel for or with them. There was a startling contemporary medical team that seemed to mock, yes, but it was the formal tone that dominated the presentation.

Dharmavir Bharati’s “Andha Yug”, with the burning fields of Kurukshetra — strewn with rotting corpses, hovering vultures, pervaded by an utter depravity — is already classic dystopia. And Thiyam renders it in tragic symphony, grand drama, at once fearful and hellish.
High register

Perhaps the problem is with our days of breaking news and exposure to sensational cinema, a casual carnage in Gujarat or spectacular bombing in Iraq, where commercial media expression struggles to engage the prurient, the bored and the blasé. But tragedy in high register seems to alienate the performer’s experience. Ashwattama’s debasement and Gandhari’s hopeless anger and equally devastating remorse, played with such passion and conviction, evoke a sterile admiration for the abilities of the performers and an apathetic curiosity about tragedies that happen to “people like them.”

In a critical introduction to his excellent English translation of Andha Yug, Alok Bhalla writes: “...the play, written soon after the carnage of the Partition of the Indian... and being read once again in our rakshas times of hysterical unreason, still had the power to make us realise how close we live to the borders of nightmares. Unfortunately, however, the existing translations were not so finely inflected as to help us understand whether the play was about our anguish at finding ourselves in a terrible world where we could only lament and curse, or whether it invited us to hear, in its difficult notes of tragedy ...”

What Bhalla achieves in the translation is not under discussion here, but Thiyam’s staged version leaves the question wide open.