Director Santanu Bose’s premiere of Widowed pimp and House of Horrors combined three different stories in a single play connected by a common thread. The director spoke to Kritika Dua about how difficult it was to adapt it
The play had a setting like that of a fashion show ramp with rose petals forming the shape of a ramp. The play was an anti-narrative (explain). The opening scene had two men walking the ramp wearing black shirt and trousers, changing colours to yellow and blue, and from a shirt to a vest and so on during the course of the play. The stage had a screen attached at the back showing a man mercilessly eating a fish and a rose and many such antics. This added a new element to the narrative. Accompanying it was a grotesque effect created by amalgamation of sound and extended voice works by Bettina Wenzel, a sound artist based in Germany.
The first 15 minutes of the play was an adaptation of Widowed Pimp written by Cervantes. In the story, Trampagos, the pimp, mourns the death of his best prostitute, Pericona, as that means a loss in income. “The story is pretty complicated but I have tried to adapt it to a simple plot,” said Santanu Bose, director.
The second, House of Horrors, was a compilation of two of Franz Kafka’s novels — The Trial and Metamorphosis. It came as a surprise because these two narratives, in particular, were selected because they are not even remotely related in theme or subject. Metamorphosis is one single central action then it’s a series of followed actions. The Trial on the other hand is like a maze, too many things happening one after the other like a complex thriller. Moreover, all the stories were presented in the form of a parallel narrative. It went back and forth and was quite confusing at times. But it was Bose’s idea to bring these two narratives in because they were both by the same person.
When asked how difficult was it to adapt three different stories into one play, the director told us that it was tough to find a way to bring all these together. “We toyed around with a lot of ideas. First, we rehearsed the whole narrative version with many actors then we found it was becoming just a bit monotonous. Then we took some fragments and left something out of it. But we are still improvising on it — the work is still in progress,” said Bose.
The play also picked little moments from The Incredible and sad tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother by Gabriel García Márquez. Interestingly, all the stories are connected by disease, fear and death. Windowed Pimp is about disease and whole decaying of the body, ugliness of the body and The Incredible and sad tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother is about elaborate prostitution.
Metamorphosis’s protagonist is a salesman, an extension of selling oneself whereas in The Trial, Mr. K is trapped by a fault which he doesn’t even know of — a capitalist social system that needs to produce results and if you can’t you are thrown out. Both the texts deals with selling oneself in one way or another and being a failure at it. “Human beings are slowly becoming garbage. I was trying to capture that idea,” pointed Bose. Trying to find out how receptive is the audience to such intellectual content, He said, “It’s too much of an expectation from them. It’s for a discerning audience.” A play like this needed certain kind of sophistication and preparation.