Monday,11,2019

Published on Friday 18, 2005 in The Telegraph India.

It took Footsbarn Travelling Theatre all of 10 years to return to Calcutta, and we must thank Prithvi Theatre (Mumbai) and our own Seagull Foundation for the Arts for facilitating their arrival.

Those lucky enough to have seen this theatre collective's magical Romeo and Juliet in 1995 had looked forward to a future visit, and been disappointed each time as Footsbarn's interpretations of The Odyssey (1997) and The Winter's Tale (1998) went to other cities in India, with Mumbai remaining a constant.

This year, Prithvi laudably managed to replicate Footsbarn's avowed itinerant status by arranging a national tour spanning such off-the-beaten-track international stopovers as Heggodu (Karnataka, home of the pioneering cultural centre Ninasam), Auroville and Thiruvananthapuram, plus Bangalore, Chennai and Delhi.

The production itself, Perchance to Dream, did not live up to Footsbarn's high standards of Shakespeare. The concept is dubious, corresponding to a greatest-hits package. It reminded me of the Complete Works of Shakespeare show, a rollicking romp through all the plays that never took itself or the Bard seriously.

But that was partly a good thing, for it put Shakespeare on his head, seeing him from a different perspective, whereas Footsbarn did fairly standard renderings of three major tragedies, linked in capsule format.

The only time they roused us was when the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream decided to enact King Lear, in place of Pyramus and Thisbe in the original.

For that brief section ' as one of them wanted to perform Regan (whom they initially confused with Ronald) ' la Michael Jackson's moonwalk, another Cordelia as a kung-fu fighter, and Lear ordered his daughters to 'squeak' (not 'speak') ' the old Footsbarn seemed resurrected, making us both laugh and think. The thematic segues between the plays were interesting: at the point of the lovers' marriage, Romeo and Juliet morphed into Gertrude's marriage with Claudius being celebrated in Hamlet.

When the Prince of Denmark stages the Mousetrap, Hamlet faded into the play within the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream. This, in turn, as it reached the storm in King Lear, gave way to the opening heath scene in Macbeth.

The second half shifted to the depictions of death towards the end of the tragedies, leaving behind every trace of comedy. This cut-and-paste technique ultimately did not give us any extra insight into Shakespearean drama, though it may have offered those who had not read their Shakespeare a better outline of his stories than Charles Lamb or a Reader's Digest condensed edition.

Footsbarn's freewheeling performance style was intact. According to them, 'theatre remains the richest of all art forms, for it contains them all; it speaks to all the senses, visual, emotional and rational'.
Shashi and Sanjna Kapoor with members of Footsbarn Travelling Theatre. Picture by Aranya Sen

To that end, they used masks, cast shadow-theatre effects with backlit figures on a white screen, projected black-and-white silent footage shot at their barn in France and, most evocatively, had Romeo and Juliet in bed manipulating puppets of themselves embracing ' a delicately erotic sequence.

Apart from English, the actors spoke in French (Romeo), Japanese (Ophelia), Malayalam (Lady Macbeth), and even scraps of Bengali. But then all this is nothing new in Western theatre now; it has become quite acceptable and even fashionable.

Besides, the anthological nature of the project prevented any actor from fully developing the characterisation of any of Shakespeare's classic heroes.

The most pleasant surprise on Footsbarn's itinerary was at the preview in Uma Gallery for select invitees, where the company's musicians, Tracy and Ewan Shiels, delivered an entertaining set of traditional and modern songs. Ewan, a born comic (he acted the doltish Goneril), plays great guitar and mandolin, while guitarist and percussionist Tracy has a perfect voice.

Also going by the name of Sons of the Desert, the couple excelled on deadpan songs like the one about Rover the dog who 'got eaten by the escalator'.

For Never on a Sunday, Ewan kept strumming the melody innocuously, then suddenly but imperceptibly pumped hard-rock riffs of Sunshine of Your Love or Smoke on the Water and looked behind in annoyance, pretending that someone was bent on disrupting his performance. It crystallised fun in true Footsbarn fashion.