Director Rajat Kapoor’s I Don’t like it, As You like It takes the traditional ‘battle of the sexes’ duel to an incandescent contemporaneity and rip-roaring laughter. Team Viva reports from the first weekend of the Aadyam theatre fest
The Shakespearean fool has been a great dramatic tool and often ended up being most remembered after the protagonists. The Bard not only deployed the jester for comic interludes but invested him with qualities of a satirist and observer alongside verbal wit and talent for intellectual repartee. Though jocular, his fools were the real wise men, summarising the human condition, showing a mirror to society, setting the players on a course correction and most importantly, signifying the ephemerality of life on a stage we call world. We enter, play our parts and we exit. So our role-playing is of little consequence. Which is why King lear philosophises, “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
Director Rajat Kapoor has, therefore, distilled this aspect of the Shakespearean jester to present a series of Chaplinesque reinterpretations of his collected works in the present context. So far he has been successful with Hamlet: The Clown Prince and Nothing like lear. His latest irreverent take of the pastoral play, As You like It, cheekily titled I Don’t like it, As You like It, however, takes the traditional “battle of the sexes” duel to an incandescent contemporaneity and rip-roaring laughter. It is an organic fuselage of the imagination that Kapoor so believes in and one that lets his actors take off.
Kapoor uses the “play within a play” concept of As You like It to great advantage. The original, as many would recall, is about Rosalind and Orlando, both of whom fall prey to courtly deceit, the girl by a manipulative uncle and the latter by an avaricious usurper brother. Outcasts both, they find refuge, and love, in the countryside, the forest of Arden, to be more precise. They are accompanied by a few good souls who follow them to exile, Rosalind by her cousin Celia and Touchstone the jester, and Orlando by his man servant. In the countryside, they chance upon the very melancholic Jacques and the pastoral lovers Silvius and Phoebe. Unshackled by societal expectations and manipulations, Rosalind decides to take on the garb of a man, Ganymede, to tease Orlando, gauge the depth of his feelings and look at the world through the male gaze.
So Kapoor’s play begins with a performing troupe of clowns fallen into bad times, who have to rehearse Shakespeare no less and put up a show in a couple of days. They are a motley set, jelling as a tribe but individually and egoistically picking on each other’s flaws and frailties. There are also couplings amid the chaos of name-calling and mutual shaming. There’s Coco and Mimi, passionate at one moment, at each other’s throats the next but possessive about their togetherness and not allowing interchangeable equations. Then there is Fifi and Fido, (who are to play the lovelorn Phoebe and Silvius) the former suffocated by his obseiquosness and the latter, forever obliging and pampering. Soso, who has never managed to deliver even a so-so performance on stage, is disappointed with everything in the world and has his own brand of melancholia, which only comes alive with his alter ego in his hand puppet Toto. He hardly does things in-toto though. Gigi is a new clown from France, who has recently joined the troupe, is pompous and uppity but hardly manages to find her space in the troupe, riven as it is with petty jealousies, rivalries and insecurities. She, however, finds some solace in the theatre-director Popo, an out-of-work artiste who is seeking credibility with a comedy, which, he says, “is just two laughs and a death away from being a tragedy.” One liners like these are peppered all over the play, trenchant and hilarious at the same time. Sample Coco’s song, “Dear Rosalinda, I met you on Tinder.”
Anyway, Popo decides to pick the Rosalind/Ganymede idea and decides that all men clowns will play women and vice versa. This interchanging of roles confuses the dynamics of the play as well as the clowns, who are conflicted by playing to the requirements of their character and their actual feelings as a man or woman for their partner. The director makes it amply clear that it is in the fulsomeness of their genderless selves that they realise the meaning of life. The high point is when Coco as Rosalind/Ganymede is serenaded by Mimi as Orlando, both giving into their gender impulses to placate the other with Gigi, as a male, reminding who they should be.This leads to a boisterous, situational comedy but also helps each clown understand the other better and demolish their own behavioural biases and generalisations. Even the depressive Jacques realises that melancholy equally applies to Jacqueline and it is as her that he can deliver the great “all the world’s a stage speech.” With Popo disciplining every actor by hitting them on their derrieres, each of them metaphorically gets a reality check and evolves as better versions of themselves.
The play has a taut yet rambunctious run of 100 minutes, the audience never missing the slightest point and glued to the action throughout. Kapoor, who has been a patient listener-host in TV chat shows, seems to have culled the crucial issues and definitions of man-woman relationships from up close.
The chemistry of the ensemble cast is incredible, with no one missing a cue or comic timing, considering they had to speak in an Italian English, their collective energy sparkling throughout. Now this is not an easy task when each of them is a stage performer/comedian/writer to reckon with and are expected to be a hoot. Vinay Pathak as Fido, Cyrus Sahukar as Jacques and Faeza Jalali as Mimi are recognisable faces but behind their clownish masks, each knows when to let go and let the other take over instead of overshadowing or overplaying their skills. This is an egoless and seamless performance which makes it such a float. We also like the props of the forest of Arden, white trees cut out of gossamer fabric, cascading down and rustling with the air vents, delicate, fragile, malleable, just like our twisting role-playing in this world. Or the stage.