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Laughing with ‘Hamlet the Clown Prince’ Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Mon, 10/04/2010 10:09 AM | Feature |
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A lighter mood: Members of the Cinematograph theater group, from Mumbai, India, take the stage to play Hamlet the Crown Prince during the Salihara Festival last week. The award-winning comedy play is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. JP/J. Adiguna
Gibberish-speaking clowns attempt to take on William Shakespeare’s tragedy of the Danish prince Hamlet. The result: a playful yet thoughtful analysis of Hamlet sending the audience rolling with laughter.
Mumbai-based director Rajat Kapoor presented his award-winning play Hamlet the Clown Prince to Jakarta as part of the Salihara Festival on Sept. 27 and 28. Kapoor’s clowns - Soso, Fido, Bouzo, Nemo, Fifi, Coco and Popo – are not merely the cliché of a Clown Company that only aims to make people laugh. Ambitious like Hamlet, they aim to tackle tragedy and make people “laugh until they cry”.
And that they did. After more than an hour of playing - or messing about - with the bard’s plot, the clown Soso who played Hamlet launched into an existential contemplation, taking the audience with him to think about death.
“Everybody dies. All clowns die. All these people sitting here, one day will die,” actor Atul Kumar as Soso said to Bouzo, his love-hate clown partner, who plays Hamlet’s mother Gertrude.
Ophelia, played by the sweet junior clown Fifi, had just drowned in the river - dejected and heartbroken, which made Bouzo sob and express her fear of death. Nemo, the shy clown, played Hamlet’s love interest Ophelia. Her father Polonius continued Soso’s reflection with: “We all try to conquer the earth but finally become earth”.
Hamlet the Clown Prince is Kapoor’s postmodern reinterpretation of Hamlet. A multilayer text; a play within a play; the Clown Prince uses comedy on top of tragedy to deal with issues of death, self-obsession, misogyny and love.
The Clown Prince is also a refreshing and wild reflection on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as the clowns weave in and out of Hamlet, giving out their own interpretations and meanings to the play.
A suggestion that Ophelia should learn how to swim came out from Fido, the dance-happy clown of the group of clowns, hilariously played by Neel Bhopalam — from him we had popular culture references such as the Lion King’s “Circle of Life”, the Joker’s line “Why so serious” from the Batman movie, through to Michael Jackson’s moonwalk and Godzilla. Fido plays the ghost of the former King and Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle.
Meanwhile the occasional French-speaking Bouzo, played by Puja Sarup, views Hamlet as a misogynist indecisive spoiled brat. Nemo, played by Namit Das, suggested that Hamlet’s obsession with his father’s death and his mother’s remarrying his uncle was due to the prince’s inclination to incest.
Kapoor said he used clowns because of his fascination with them and his interest in interpreting Hamlet in a different way. “I thought that doing this with clowns would put some distance between us and the play… so we could step out of the play and look at it from the outside,” he said.
“And that’s how we do it. Sometimes they play a part, come out and then come back to its characters [and ask] ‘Why is Hamlet doing this to Ophelia?’ It gives us that freedom, to do it with clowns,” he said.
“Also I was feeling that if you do a tragedy in a way that it is normally done, I think it has less impact.
“But if you make them laugh and then suddenly move them, I think it has more impact,” he said.
Death and people’s fear and avoidance of the inevitable was a main theme in Kapoor’s play. |
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Making a mess: A group of clowns entertain the audience by misinterpreting the original text in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, finding new meanings to it, and overall making a mess of Shakespeare’s seminal play. JP/J.Adiguna
From the beginning, the audience saw the clowns’ unease with death when the other five clowns looked terrified as Soso blurted out that everybody dies in Hamlet the play.
“The idea was to have clowns but not lose the pathos of the play nor lose the tragedy of the play. We kept moving between the pathos and the clowns,” Kapoor said.
Hamlet’s ill treatment of Ophelia, which led to her becoming deranged and Soso’s ill treatment of Nemo by gagging him with a black tape - when he was about to recite the scene of Polonius and Hamlet – were some of the scenes resulting in mixed feelings of hilarity and poignancy.
The actors’ interaction with the others on the stage was fluid and precisely timed. Sujay Saple as Popo the ringmaster was spirited and he tied the scenes together nicely. Rachel D’Souza was the sweet and funny Fifi, a clown who played the deranged Ophelia.
Kapoor and the actors modified tiny bits of the play to give it a Jakartan context. When Soso was late, he gave the typical Jakarta’s “traffic jam” excuse. The clowns continuously interact with the audience, from Soso mocking the laughing audience to Bouzo flirting with a man in the audience and throwing her red garter to him.
Popo made fun of the audience when he was convincing Soso to enact a tragedy. “Look at their faces. This is Salihara, a dark and meaningful theater!” Popo roared, which was happily followed by the audience’s laughter.
Hamlet the Clown Prince has been staged more than 70 times since its launch in 2008, Kapoor said. In Jakarta, the audience gave it long applause and a standing ovation. Kapoor said the play had been well received in different countries. “I think because it’s in English and gibberish people can relate to,” Kapoor said. Kapoor added he chose gibberish because the clowns did not belong anywhere. “They’re not part of Hamlet. They’re just a clown company”. A fascinating one, for sure. |
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