Director Sunil Shanbag’s play Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon is a take on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. He tells Utpal K Banerjee that he scripted the play in such a way so as to retain the spirit of the Bhangwadi theatre-performance
Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon, recently presented in Delhi by Arpana Theatre from Mumbai, harks back, by three centuries, to the Bombay of the 1800s for inspiration from its adopted Bhangwadi theatre-style. The play’s text goes back, by another two centuries, to All’s Well that Ends Well, believed to have been written by William Shakespeare between 1604 and 1605 and one of his “problem plays.” Neither comedy, nor tragedy but cynical and ending with perfunctory compromise. The Bard borrowed his story from Boccaccio’s collection of ribald fiction, The Decameron, that first came in print in 1620, but whose tales were in circulation for quite some years. It remained one of his lesser-known plays due to its curious mixture of fairy-tale logic, gender-role reversal and cynical realism. Helena, the low-born ward of a Spanish countess, is head over heels with the countess’s son Bertram. She follows the unwilling youth to Paris to heal the French King of his ailments and the latter allows Helena to select her husband. Her inevitable choice is Bertram, who rejects her forthwith. After an enforced marriage ceremony, Bertram goes to war in Italy without as much as a goodbye-kiss and leaves an almost impossible condition — she should bear his child and wear his family ring. In Italy, Bertram becomes a successful warrior; Helena follows him surreptitiously, consummates their marriage, wearing his ring through the stratagem of a seduced virgin; and returns home to explain everything, winning approbation from Bertram rather than true love. All ends well. All through, there is stark similarity between love and war — in conquering and seducing; in betraying and out- maneuvering.
The play, under Aadyam Festival, is a clever, adaptation from Shakespeare, as set between Gujarat and Bombay in the 19th century, when the latter was reaping benefits of a flourishing opium trade. Heli (Helena) is madly in love with Bharatram (Bertram), the son of her guardian. However, Bharatram, an ambitious youth, moves to Bombay to work for his uncle, the merchant-prince Gokuldas Bhatia (enacted by Utkarsh Mazumdar). Armed with the support of Bharatram’s mother, Heli ventures to Bombay to declare her love for him. A reluctant Bharatram is talked into the marriage by Gokuldas, only to flee to Rangoon in an attempt to strike an opportunistic alliance with a princess. What follows is a Shakespearean series of mistaken identities that ultimately lead Heli and Bharatram to get together. Though the director maintains there is a contemporary gaze on the man-woman relationship and the wife and the other woman bond to teach the man a lesson, today’s audience wouldn’t exactly like Heli giving in with a flip of her head. Much as Shanbag tried to make Heli take the upper hand with her caustic disgust in the end, her acceptance was not conflicted enough. The Bard, too, probably had wanted to raise the question whether a marriage was meant to be a socially stitched compromise rather than happiness.
Directed by Sunil Shanbag, the present play does another re-wind, to Bombay’s Bhangwadi theatre — located on the Kalbadevi Road opposite the Metro cinema in town — where cannabis and opium trade among the Parsis and Gujaratis flourished. The theatre was in the old Rangbhoomi song customs. In the old days, the painted curtains were dropped to allow sequencing of scenes and changing of actors’ costumes; audience shouted “encore” to the live singers on stage, then ecstatically threw wallets of money there — to be duly collected on a spread-out sheet; and the auditoria reverberated with the refrains of the “encore” songs: carried on everybody’s lips. In the sanitised version of Shanbag, the cyclorama had the scene-changes in a photo-frame and there was, sadly, no “encores” or wallet-throwing. Dialogues bore resonance of Shakespeare yet were too refined to glimpse Elizabethan ribaldry!
Excerpts from interview with the director:
How did you change the play’s contextIJ
I placed the Shakespeare classic in the context of Indian mercantile history and replaced the original world of nobles and royals to one of trade and commerce between Saurashtra, old Bombay and Rangoon at the turn of the 19th century.
How much did you follow the Bhangwadi formIJ
I didn’t want my play to become a museum piece but only to retain the spirit of the Bhangwadi theatre-performance: popular in Bombay in the 1900s. I wanted it to remain distinctive in its use of music where all the characters were singers as well, using mostly folk-style. The painted curtains in the backdrop gave an old-world play-house effect.
But the painted curtains were also used in the Parsi theatre…
You’ll be surprised to know how much give-and-take were there between the 1890s and the 1910s among the Gujarati, Marathi and Parsi forms. Even Goan theatre offered a unique tiatra style with a heady concoction of Indian and Portuguese melodies. I am planning to recreate the totality of that period.
Any difficulties in adaptationIJ
The challenge of converting Shakespeare’s play to Hindi was beyond merely switching languages. Mihir Bhuta, the writer, found an equivalent lingo that addresses the Bard’s spirit, while keeping the core in tact and yet being accessible to the Hindi speaker. The original Gujarati play was a huge success because there was a great deal of simplicity in the story-telling and an ecstasy in the experience itself.