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An exploration of absurdist absurdity and chromatic deficiency without ever planning to be thus, this year’s highly controversial production directed by Shayoni Mitra cracked the executive council of the Shakespeare Society and spilled its yolk on the resignation carpet. By controversial we mean accidentally so (an example of an accident: Neel Chaudhri having his Desires run over by a Streetcar.). The debate around Antigone continues, many days after the play has entered its post-terrible-performance-in-Delhi and pre terrible-performance-in-Calcutta phase. Let us for the sake of simplicity and arrogance represent the debates here in all their painful splendour…or lets not. Lets just tell you a story, a story that is printed in black ink, lest we pass judgments. As we all know, “there are no blacks or whites in the play, only shades of gray paint on my face”. The play opens (as our eyes shut, to use the popular criticism cliché) with a cracker imitation of a previous Rajpal production which prided itself with a bilingual winning streak. This moved onto scenes that had actors screaming for glycerine like a Bengali for fish. Oh, I found Creon’s “getting into character” mantra:
Then they died.
All. Curtain
call.
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Director’s (K)note:
I chose this play because the dichotomies in Shake-Soc were getting too hard to handle, kind of like the Beckett dissidents in my life. My supreme monarchical shades of gray kick in once in a while and I know I’m right. To paraphrase Srirup, the Stalin-meets-Donald Duck montage : “Kill all Desires, till they Neel over and die”. By killing I don’t mean an evil act, because nothing is truly evil, there is an inherent grayness in life. Paint all the faces! Dress the characters in yellow! Burn the resignation letters! Pray for Opel Astra!
And urmm…Shake a Soc…Simplify.
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