Classics For The Times
The comforting thing about literature, as generations of college students and teachers have told each other, is that the really great writers speak across the generations in voices as fresh today as when they were first written. The corollary to that is that each generation gets the recreations and interpretations of the classics that they deserve.
This is not reflected in the books themselves so much as in the theatre and the film world. So about four decades back, the West saw versions of Shakespeare and Marlowe plays that had strong political overtones to them; three decades back, versions of the same plays or of other novels appeared that explored the pitfalls and possibilities of an anarchic, unselfish society. Our decade has steadily been leaning towards an interpretation of those musty classics that brings business into the limelight.
If some time ago you had an interpretation of Richard III that cast the king as a neo-Nazi performing to the accompaniment of jackboots, in our generation we have finally got the Macbeth we deserve. In a production that promises to be crowded with stars from the movie world, Macbeth and his missus receive the ultimate nineties update.
Wielding his cellphone as effectively as a broadsword, Macbeth is now the epitome of the up-and-coming young entrepreneur hell-bent on becoming a takeover tycoon. His target is Duncan, perfectly cast as an old world, paternalistic corporate chieftain whose only crime is that he forgot to watch his back.
Updating Shakespeare and Co is always tricky: at worst, the attempt could end up as a politically correct, insipid morality tale for our times with the sole advantage of a rather beautiful set of dialogues. At best, though, the power and glory of the original can mesh with a creative interpretation to make it the definitive treatise for our times. Naturally, then, in Croatia you've had Romeo and Juliet with the Montagues and Capulets replaced by the Serbs and the Bosnians.
Poland and other Eastern European countries for some time pushed theatre to the limits using old scripts and new ideas. The Tempest was redrafted in one spectacular performance, several years ago, as a tale of colonisation at its most brutal, with Caliban recast as the Noble Savage. A Warsaw enactment of Faust pushed together Marlow and Goethe to come up with the story of a resistance leader fatally seduced by the banal lures of extra bedsheets, guaranteed daily bread and sausage, and an occasional glass of beer tossed in for free.
Not all of these retakes on the Bard and other English playwrights will survive for more than a few years, forget about an entire generation. But, presented alongside fresh theatre and new scripts, they can make both actor and viewer alike realise that the power of an idea, a concept, a character is measured in terms of its durability.
Barring perhaps School for Scandal, it's very difficult to put more than a cosmetic spin on Sheridan, for instance. And who performs a Galsworthy play with its stuffy moral science lessons any more these days, though G B Shaw remains as durable today as he was at the turn of the century.
In India, what's politely called regional language theatre, thereby conveniently dumping several extremely diverse forms into one useful basket, still outstrips the better funded English language theatre by miles. The common excuse, as troupes carry on with a predictable repertoire of musicals, Neil Simon, Shakespeare, bedroom farces and a few genuflections to Becket and Albee, is that we haven't produced good playwrights yet.
In a country which has recently seen a lot of Dattani and not as much of Manjula Padmanabhan as we might have desired, coupled with some brilliant translations of playwrights as diverse as Vijay Tendulkar and Mahasweta Devi, that argument is an obscenity.
Even when there is a good script going, English theatre is often not up to the task. Joy Michael's premiere of Padmanabhan's Harvest was painstaking, but hampered by the fact that out of a cast of seven, only Monsoon Bissell and Zohra Sehgal appeared to understand that being able to act was a necessary prerequisite to stepping onstage. As we sat in a friend's house steeped in gloom after the show, one fellow sufferer voiced the general feeling. "I think I'll go to Mumbai when the Marathi performance is on," he said, "at least Marathi theatre starts with the assumption that you have to have actors before you can put on a play."