Monday,15,2019
Prof. Ananda Lal is an academic and theatre critic based in Kolkata. He is Professor of English at Jadavpur University where he teaches Drama in Practice and regularly directs the annual departmental production.
Interviewed by Sri Abhishek Sarkar and Sri Arunava Banerjee.
AS: Were you engaged with any Shakespeare production outside JU? Apart from Tim Supple’s production of course?
No, I can’t remember any that I did.
AS: Have these productions been well documented? The ones from our department? Can we have a detailed account of them?
Yes, the cast list is there, photos, videos, the reviews are also there. Dharani-da [Dharani Ghosh] who was the great, well, maybe not great, but the most respected theatre critic of that time, one of the last reviews he wrote was of my The Merchant of Venice, and he titled it ‘A Scandal in Venice’. He didn’t like it!
AS: Was it the one in which PB [Prof. Prodosh Bhattacharya] ran amok?
I don’t think you can call Prodosh’s appearances [as both Morocco and Aragon] as running amok, it was under strict directorial supervision and orders. Yes, that is the same production. Dharani-da did not like the idea of a woman as Shylock, that was Sohini [Sengupta].
AS: So what was the reason for casting a woman as Shylock?
Actually I do these things only partly conceptually. It does happen eventually as a concept, but more often than not, what I find is that there are talented actors or a certain kind of casting pool I have at a particular moment in time, and I then start thinking (more especially since Drama in Practice has become a course) what play can suit this group. Unlike most directors, I don’t select the play first, and then audition, for I have found that this fails, as far as university theatre is concerned. So I find who is coming in, who is willing to join us that particular four-month period and I accordingly choose the play. At that time I had four brilliant actresses, and I began to think that I have to do something that allows each one of them sufficient space to perform properly. Whereas only a handful of men were good enough. You know what kind of lopsided gender proportion there is in Shakespeare, so I had to somehow balance this out. With the communal tension happening in India working in my mind, it was then that Merchant of Venice struck me, because clearly the play has four big parts, Shylock, Antonio, Portia and Gobbo. These for me were the really major parts. I thought that’s brilliant, it’s going to work, because I am going to have four women do these four parts. Sohini was a natural for Shylock, she was clearly showing a natural flair for the theatre; of course, she has left English theatre behind, this was before she joined Nandikar officially. She also did Pinter with us, that same year. The very uninhibited Vaishali, who is teaching in Bhawanipur Education College, was Portia. Debolina [now with JU Press], I chose as Antonio, whose name I changed to Antonia, therefore I straightened out – politically incorrectly – the male bonding/ friendship with Bassanio, but it doesn’t matter whether male or female, the same tensions work as we found with Antonia. Another remarkably talented actress who I wish had taken to theatre and is now in Bombay was Reshma Ghosh. Earlier on she had been in my Arms and the Man, and The Importance of Being Earnest. She told me, ‘Sir, I don’t want to do romantic heroines any longer, I want a challenge’, so I said ‘Okay, do Gobbo, the extreme opposite', and I thought she did very well. There were others, younger: Ankita Mukherji [of NDTV] was Jessica; Mahira Kakkar, now a professional actor in New York, she was doing Salerio or Solanio, that was her first role, I think, she showed great promise, and obviously starred in our later productions; Sunandini Banerjee, of Seagull. [More seasoned actors too, like Dr Abhijit Gupta, recently returned from England, but not yet on our faculty.] All in all I liked that production. It took a long long time, about six or seven months, and there was a time in the middle that things were not working out, class timings and other things were conflicting, so I said ‘Let’s shelve this’. But we had got halfway through the production and it would be demoralizing for them to completely do nothing, so I got the idea of doing Pinter, some of his short revues and monologues, quickly recast the same Merchant of Venice cast into the Pinter skits and sketches, and did an invited performance at British Council. Miraculously Merchant of Venice started rolling again, it was probably that adrenaline rush through Pinter that made everything fall into place, and the production finally happened.
And the other production Measure for Measure?
Measure for Measure was a result of the newly-designed Drama in Practice course, but of course we got in a lot of other students who were not part of the course, so it was a huge cast. This is one of the big, big problems with Shakespeare, most groups or companies find it very difficult to find such large casts, so you need to reduce, to find all kinds of alternatives, to cut down, and anyway the plays are perhaps too long for this day and age, which is an issue with his texts now. But in all the plays I do, I tend to keep as much of the play as possible, I try to be faithful to the texts, I do have an obligation to the students to show that it can be done without necessarily messing around too much with the text. Very often contemporary adaptations do that, and I can easily do that, but as a teacher of English I have a duty to demonstrate how the original text can be transferred on stage as much as possible. Measure for Measure was a kind of logical culmination of casting women as men or men as women, which they have been forced to do in several other plays as well, because in English departments that is one of the issues, we have a majority of women and a minority of men, the reverse of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae. So I thought let’s take it to the limit, all the men being played by women, all the women being played by men. It was very chaotic, it was very anarchic, but while I wouldn’t consider it to be one of my best productions, I would definitely say that it captured the anarchic frenzy of the original. And by the way, The Telegraph for some totally incomprehensible reason chose Measure for Measure as one of the best five productions of the year, I still haven’t fully understood it, obviously somebody liked it [see link]! One of the students, Rohini Chaki, who did Claudio very well as a man, wrote her PhD in Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh, so I was obviously part of her development into theatre arts. [Shuktara Lal, who played the Duke, went on to Performance Studies at New York University.]
AS: What was the initial reaction of the cast to the idea of cross-dressing?
I have to say that our students are game for anything! Initially there might have been some questions, but they were completely acceptable, because it is a shock to begin with. Karma was brilliant, as was Bodhisatwa, doing these outrageously cross-dressed parts as prostitutes. Debojoy was a much more proper, prim heroine. Actually boys love doing this, they have been cross-dressing since … ! For guys, for men, it is part of their exhibitionism anyway, they go through a phase of wanting to wear skirts or lipstick or just be kind of different. You are raising your eyebrows? You don’t know mankind! Obviously, as you understand, Shakespeare’s own young boys were doing these and they must have enjoyed acting the women’s parts. It is more difficult for girls to become male. I think, though this might sound sexist, there is a certain inhibition among women, which one has to work on through workshops and then they do let go more. Eventually it went fine.
AS: Did your actors have any problems with sexuality when they were performing?
When did students ever have any problems with performing sexuality? Not at all, in fact I had to occasionally curb them, because you don’t want to send out the wrong signals to the student’s parents, that this is what JU is doing to my precious child! Which has happened, some parents don’t like what I do in terms of theatre.
AS: Yes you have written about that, the boy had a problem with his girlfriend acting.
But that repeats itself, it was not just that one instance, just this year there was a girl who opted out after signing up for Drama in Practice, because her parents said no. This is the 21st century, people! Other things too, but I don’t want to reveal more personal stuff. There are others who think that I am quite a culpable figure for what I have allowed the students to do and eventually go on from there to do in their lives.
AS: Did you feel any additional pressure while mounting a Shakespeare production? Or is Shakespeare just another playwright for you?
Just another playwright. However, I must say because of the reasons I have already explained in terms of the large casts and the length of the plays, it does become more pressurizing, but those are after all superficial things.
AS: But the language wouldn’t be a problem?
Language is not a problem. Once the actors know and understand the meaning and allusions you have to take a call, do they get across in this day and age? If it is too obscure and topical only for Renaissance London, then drop it. I often intercut metrically; when I have done that with Shakespeare, within speeches, I have still maintained the meter, so we have joined lines occasionally but keeping iambic pentameter. Yes, occasionally I have dropped entire scenes, but then that is mainly for reasons of length, like Gobbo’s father had to go. I have written about this [in India's Shakespeare, ed. Trivedi and Bartholomeusz] – wonderful scene, but I had to drop it because of time pressure, nowadays people cannot sit beyond two hours on stage and I don’t have an experienced cast, we must be realistic here, who can hold an audience for, say, two and a half hours.
AS: Did you emphasize the blank verse part? I don’t remember.
No, nobody does that nowadays, they speak their lines very naturally, like colloquial English, and we have all seen, whether it is companies from here or outside India, that the meaning gets across if you put in your expressions, emotions to make it clear what you are saying.
AS: In Measure for Measure some of the lines were delivered as rap.
Yes, but they were originally rhymed couplets, so that could well happen depending on our contemporary context. Peter Brook says, and I strongly believe this, that theatre lives by surprise. When you have a playwright like Shakespeare who, specially in Calcutta, many people know by heart, you have to surprise them somehow, or the point of a production gets lost. They know the story anyway, so things have to be done to not necessarily upset them, but to make the audience sit up and notice, “Oh I see, so you can do this too, therefore I can interpret this differently, I didn’t realize that, but I can. Wow!”
AS: Which theatre directors influenced you the most?
By actual physical proximity?
AS: Also theoretically.
Oh, you know, as a historian of the stage, I would have a lot to name and I don’t want to get into that here. But I would certainly say Tagore is there as a director, Peter Brook is there, I would have to say that I have done Brecht and in a certain sense his ideas have influenced me. I have adopted ideas from Artaud, though Brook himself has done that. Theatre people tend to be like magpies, they take whatever is required for a particular production. In my own ... Grotowski, Badal Sircar, they have all influenced me. One of the reasons I go out of my way to try offending or upsetting the audience is to bring them into small spaces, intimate theatre. I have done that repeatedly and I am doing that again this year, which makes a new generation sit up and realize that we didn’t know theatre can be like this! That comes ultimately from Artaud through other sources, even Badal Sircar, who was one of my inspirations as an impressionable teenager, when I saw Spartacus for the first time in the Academy. It was a stunning and even shocking experience, so all of that has obviously gone into me. Among people who I have worked with, I would definitely say Tim Supple (I have written about it so I don’t think I need to say this aloud, my full account of my participation as a dramaturge on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the Shakespearean International Yearbook 12). The way he visualizes, rehearses and knows every person, not just the actors, but the musicians, the designers, everyone individually, and bonds with them, it is marvellous. With all the kind of intercultural debates that have gone on, about whether Peter Brook exploited Indians or appropriated Indian art-forms and artists for the Mahabharata, Tim knew this and I was telling him all this. It was my dramaturgical contribution partly, to be sensitive to these issues, but I realized that he doesn’t really need me, because he already was extremely democratic, equal, there was no question of exploitation over here at all. One of the main things that I point out is that everybody, regardless of whether they were a fairy or the romantic leads, was paid the same amount. That is a lesson. There was big money involved in this production, and that was one of the reasons a lot of people didn’t like it, so much money being lavished on it, but I thought that Tim used it very very well, in terms of the site-specific places where he performed. Did you see the Tollygunge Club show? It was beautiful. It loses its touch when it goes indoors. I don’t mean to be literal here, but that is what Shakespeare is thinking of, a forest. So you have the background, it is open-air, and you have a backdrop of trees; he brought in all the red sand, which is creative use of the money that he used imaginatively.
AS: Did you actually influence his take on the play?
That is a question you should put to Tim. I don’t think so. Notionally I was credited with the dramaturgy, and he was asking me certain things during rehearsals, especially the time we spent in Pondicherry, where the final rehearsals took place, at Adishakti, but it was more a sense that he was asking me as a sounding board, as a kind of confirmation that this is the way to go, isn’t it, Ananda, and I would say OK, yes, or maybe I had a point or two that he was free to reject or take; it was more to have someone at his right hand or whatever as the process was going on. I think that was basically it, they were all South Asians performing and after all he was British, just to tell him in case I felt that something was not on, that there was any kind of superiority-inferiority or any interpretation that might look exploitative. But I think that it was entirely his vision, his concept, and I wouldn’t really like to take credit for any part of it, I was just hanging around there when he needed me.
AS: One thing didn’t get done very well, the thing about pouring some water on a Shivalinga.
Well, that happened very oddly, out of the blue. They had found this place in Pondicherry that manufactures what it advertises as talking stones. It was not meant to be a lingam, but most Indians interpreted it as that, as it looked a little like that, but if you go to Pondicherry you will find they are available elsewhere as well, you rub them and (physics, right) they emit a particular frequency of sound that can increase in volume. The actors were playing around with it, Tim heard it and said I’ll take it.
AS: The sound didn’t actually come across to us.
It did whenever I saw the play; remember it is very high-pitched, it may not work in certain situations. It was definitely misinterpreted, but even if you interpret it as the lingam, what is A Midsummer Night’s Dream about, after all? Especially with Supple taking on sexuality as a key theme, I didn’t think that he was doing anything unacceptable, or else I would have told him.
AS: Also the song that we have at the very end.
I thought personally it was an epiphanic moment, what was your problem with it?
AS: Such a really rosy picture of sexuality?
No, no, I don’t think he ever suggested that, because right through the play he had all these sequences where it was very violent, physical, sometimes even bordering on lust, but after all it is a romantic comedy about love, and the pairs do unite in marriage. Wherever it went , regardless of East or West, that final song – everybody in the audience was on their feet, I just think about it and I feel the tears in my eyes – I mean he is very good at that, after all he is an opera director as well, so he knew his music thoroughly, and he brought in Manipuri music too. He knows the kinds of moments where song really works in a production and that’s where you want it to work, at the very end. It worked.
AB: What is going to be your next Shakespeare production?
No more Shakespeare, definitely. Look, I have only three years left here, I would rather not. There are many other playwrights I would love to do, and I want to now try those. For a long time I wanted to do Rabindranath, and I kept deferring, and kept deferring. I think I should tell you this because Sukanta-da [Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri] was instrumental in saying from the very beginning, since I started doing shows for JUDE from 1993, why don’t you do Shakespeare? Any director would want to do Shakespeare at a certain point in their careers, but I have now gone on, and after my retirement what I am going to do I have no clue, but as far as JUDE is concerned, no more Shakespeare! Been there, done that, and happy with it. I have also directed what I always wanted to, Tagore's Arup Ratan, so that’s over, too. Tagore is a closed chapter for me, Shakespeare is also a closed chapter for me.
AS: Have you seen any of the former JUDE productions directed by Debabrata-babu [Prof. Debabrata Mukherjee]?
Actually I did see a couple of Tintin’s [Dr Abhijit Gupta when he was a JUDE student actor] and reviewed at least one of them, if not both. But not Debabrata-babu’s. Maybe they were when I was not here; I was gone for my PhD for five years, 1981-86, and in my college days, apart from one JU students' festival that I participated in, I myself didn’t see any JU plays (though I knew many people here, and many of our classmates and batches above and below came to JU for their MA). I was too busy doing other productions perhaps.
AS: Who conducted the workshops for your two productions? Workshops are something which are not usually documented.
No, everything is written down, I have to check the cast and crew list and get back to you. But in the early period, the first three or four years, I didn’t do workshops, just didn’t have time for that, so did they happen for The Merchant of Venice? I am not quite sure. But Measure for Measure? It is there, it is on the flyer. I normally get someone from outside to conduct workshops, to give the students a varied experience.