Sri lankan play Pyramus & Thisbe, directed by Jehan Aloydius and presented at NSD’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav, was a magical experience created out of two sub plots, writes UK Banerjee
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a Shakespearean comedy, written between 1590 and 1597. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and Hippolyta. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (the Mechanicals), who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies: inhabiting the woods where most of the play is set.
An intriguing feature of the Shakespearean play is that it includes a play within a play — performed by the Mechanicals — using the original from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the Ovidian version, Piramus and Thisbe, the ill-fated lovers — forbidden to meet by their feuding elders — arrange a union under a mulberry tree and state their feelings for each other. Thisbe arrives first, but upon seeing a lioness with a mouth bloody from a recent kill, she flees, leaving behind her veil. When Pyramus arrives, he is horrified at the sight of Thisbe’s veil, assuming that a wild beast has killed her. Pyramus kills himself, falling on his sword in proper Babylonian fashion and, in turn, splashing blood on the white mulberry leaves. Pyramus’ blood stains the white mulberry fruits, turning them dark. Thisbe returns: eager to tell Pyramus what had happened to her, but she finds Pyramus’ dead body under the mulberry tree. Thisbe stabs herself with the same sword. In the end, the gods change, for ever, the colour of the mulberry fruits into the stained colour: to honour the forbidden love.
Pyramus & Thisbe, presented by Centre Stage Productions from Sri lanka, is a magical experience created out of two sub-plots: first, the ‘Mechanicals’ and fairies; and, the second, the main-stream Shakespearean supernatural masque: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Directed (and adapted) by Jehan Aloydius, the mix results in an exuberant musical drama that borrows both from Elizabethan legacy from the 16th and 17th century, and from traditions of the low-country Sri lanka. Set in a forest clearing under a large mythical tree in the centre, the play unfolds, in the first part, lyrical Shakespearean verses: complete with the sleeping fairy queen put under a spell by the fragrance of a magic-blossom and waking up to fall in love with the donkey-headed Bottom.
The traditional narrative follows with fusion-dance, music, acrobatics and physical comedy. The second part is an unalloyed celebration of Sri lankan theatre-styles and forms, including Kandyan dance-gestures, ritual acts and masked lioness prancing around. In a charming interlude, audience-members are brought on stage, dressed up and made to gesticulate with theatre-characters. It’s a total theatre phenomenon.
Extracts from the notes of the director:
Tell us about the adaptation.
I set this adaptation in the south Sri lanka in a by-gone era when traditional crafts, folk theatre, and ritual mask-theatre were popular.
What are the principal elements of your showIJ
The performance features my drama-troupe’s traditional narrative techniques. It is composed of half Shakespeare and half devised theatre, physical comedy and dance. This unique inter-active form of theatre is termed ‘experimental theatre.’