Rage Production’s 12 Angry Jurors, staged at the Aadyam theatre fest, posed a relevant moral dilemma vis our justice system and societal prejudice and persuasion. Team Viva looks for new meanings in a much-adapted version
The trouble with play adaptations is that you have watched so many versions of them that you end up comparing the original with its many renditions and interpretations. So though Rage production’s 12 Angry Jurors, staged recently at the Aadyam theatre fest, raised relevant moral questions in a society homogenised more by biases than fairplay or debate, it got many talking about the film Ek Ruka Hua Faisla.
The drama is an adaptation of 12 Angry Men, a 1954 teleplay by the erican writer Reginald Rose. Director Nadir Khan’s version unfolds somewhere in contemporary India in a room in which 12 individuals on jury duty must decide the conviction of an 18-year-old slum dweller being tried for the murder of his father.
The task in hand was to establish the crime without “reasonable doubt.” And though the jurors begin by more or less agreeing that the distressed slum kid had killed his oppressive and abusive father in a fit of rage, it takes one of them to question the veracity of the evidence itself. Since the jury system is out of place in our country, having been stopped in 1959, it is a tad difficult to contextualise it. But Khan perhaps uses all the 12 jurors as a metaphor for the voices in our heads, voices that get drowned in the cacophony of loud-mouthed pre-suppositions, instant judgment and bullying majoritarianism. It is an unpeeling of our urban masks with the reality of the prejudiced, regressive,hierarchical and conditional value systems. As one of them blatantly says, “let us get them before they get us,” implying the revenge of the marginalised. Also one of the jurors, who is tormented by his own wayward son, projects his repressed frustration on to a convenient scapegoat. One of the reasons Khan gave his own spin could be because theatre companies in various countries have adapted it to their local scenarios.
The play opens with the judge’s somewhat dismissive voice handing over the charge to the jury, almost assuming that it is an open and shut case. We hear neither the prosecutor nor the defence attorney and learn of the evidence as the jurors debate and analyse it. In the process, the play becomes a critique of the justice system as we know it today. It has a contemporary relevance considering the crime is by a juvenile, who has just turned 18. The jurors gradually move away from the question if the defendant is innocent or guilty to whether the jury has a reasonable doubt about his guilt. The evidence has such gaping holes of logic that you are left wondering if the defence lawyer was sleeping on the job. How can a case stand if facts are compromised so easilyIJ Point to ponder. The principle of reasonable doubt, the belief that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, is one of the most enviable and demanding clauses of our justice system. But do we practise it indeedIJ Aren’t we given to convenient opinionatingIJ As the key dissenter juror Rajit Kapur says, “We may send the guilty back to society for all we know but is the evidence beyond doubtIJ” It isn’t.
These social conflicts are personified by the characters, all of whom have different backgrounds — corporates, businessmen, professionals, activists, homemakers, there’s even the NRI returnee who’s constantly reminded of his unpaid debt to the country of origin and his misplaced righteousness — and attitudes. This is also an extremely well-knit and timed ensemble anchored by many familiar faces of stage and ad films. While Rajit Kapur is the pivot of dissent, who gradually turns the 11-1 vote against him to 12-0 in his favour, his subtlety is matched by the combative and aggressive Deven Khote, who being a victimised father, won’t allow any argument to stand in the way of his belief. And if you are literally left gnashing your teeth by the rigidity and racism of the juror played by Prerna Chawla, you know she has been great at her job.
The play is longish, almost making you feel like it is done in real time. There has been deft use of a cinematic technique, the jury room windows screening shots of a rain-washed city outside. The screen is also used to project the private conversations in the loo between like-minded jurors and also to examine the evidence close-up, like the switch-blade knife and the layout of a chawl where the murder happened. Evidence is debated so completely that we feel we know as much as the jury does, especially about the old man who says he heard the murder and saw the defendant fleeing, and the lady across the street who says she saw it happen through the windows of a moving train, though she may or may not have been wearing glasses.
The jurors even debate the angle of the knife wound and do mock drills to analyse the efficacy of the claims. So Kapur shuffles like the old witness, a stroke victim, to see if he could have gotten to the door in time to see the murderer fleeing. In the way it balances one piece of evidence against another that seems contradictory, the play keeps it taut like a thriller. But in the end, it is not about solving the crime. It is about sending a young man to die on the possibility of contaminated evidence. “We’re talking about somebody’s life here," Kapur says. “We can’t decide in five minutes. Supposing we’re wrongIJ” In its claustrophobic intensity, the play makes you stop and think.