Hath he not lost much wealth by wreck of sea?
Buried some dear friend? Hath not else his eye
Stray’d his affection in unlawful love?

Komedy-e-Eshtebahat works with the assumption that the audience is well-versed with the plot of The Comedy Of Errors. Given that this play is gearing up to perform at the Globe to Globe festival in London where all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays will be staged in 37 languages, that is a reasonable assumption to make for their eventual target audience. Not so for the interim Bangalore audience – if someone had walked in to this show knowing nothing of Shakespeare’s original, she’d have had a hard time getting tuned in. The play dives straight into the action without overview or background. In a story that hinges on two sets of identical twins, when the actors playing the twins are not identical and some actors fill in multiple roles, the section of the audience that’s not in the know is bound to feel disoriented. A pamphlet about the play and simplified subtitles overhead behind the actors instead of on the sides would have made the play a lot more accessible.

You can’t go much wrong with the script of The Comedy Of Errors (so what if critics call it an apprentice work of the Bard), but I was a bit disappointed that they chose to focus on the slapstick elements of comedy over the situational. In a farce centred on mistaken identities, the biggest laughs ironically came from men peeking into each others’ pyjamas, a woman chasing someone with a broomstick, a man overplaying the role of a coquettish maid and people slapping each other in Priyadarshan-film style. That apart, the adaptation of context was smoothly done: shipwreck was transposed to sandstorm, 16th century Ephesus to modern-day Kabul, Antipholus to Arsalan.

What’s most commendable is that this brave troupe Rah-e-Sabz is staging the play at all, given the hardships they had to go through to reach where they are. Read about the uneasy path to the Afghan production and their problems of finding actors, especially women. The cast looked like they were having a lot of fun on stage (props to the actor who played the father – he had a most infectious cackling laughter).

I had a silent game of Spot the Hindi Word going on and soon lost count of the matches – darwaza, khidmadgar, varna, zanjeer, zindagi…so much overlap in languages, I am now embarrassed to think I struggled with the dialogues .

If there was one thing during the show that kept me firmly on home territory, it was the music – right from the opening strains of Ghar Aya Meri Pardesi to Naam Abdul Hai, even an interlude sung in Hindi. [Question: Are these originally scores from Afghani music or do Hindi film songs happen to be popular in Afghanistan?] Also entertaining was the rapport between the musicians and the actors. Komedy-e-Eshtebahat gently flouts the conventional separation between the foreground folks (the actors) and the background folks (the music-makers), with Rodaba making eyes at the zerbaghali-player and he responding in equal measure, and near the end, the flutist joining the actors, his instrument of music now a policeman’s tool.

It is hard to talk dispassionately of the merits or otherwise of a play when you know what it has taken to make it – the troupe has faced threats and street attacks, an actress’s husband has been murdered. To go against the norm and stand by one’s beliefs at the risk of personal danger is an extraordinary feat. I offer Rah-e-Sabz (which aptly means Path Of Hope) my admiration and best wishes.

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In a nod to our increasingly digitalized lives, theatres overseas have brought in the concept of "tweet seats" – seats in theaters that are set aside for people who want to live-tweet a performance. The LA Times blog reports:

Tweet seats first started surfacing at the end of the ’00s. In 2009, the Lyric Opera in Kansas reserved 100 tweet seats for its final performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s "HMS Pinafore." In those seats (and only those seats) audience members could use their phones to look at tweeted content sent by the theater’s artistic director about the production, the scenery and whatever was happening on stage. Audience members were also encouraged to tweet questions in real time.

Read the full piece here .

If the idea of the audience live-tweeting during a performance is hard for you to digest, brace yourself for this – an actor live-tweeting during a performance. Says Kate Foy, Australian theatre actor who live-tweeted during her 2011 play that she began on impulse just before going onstage on the opening night. She was naturally asked how it was possible for her to tweet during the performance. Her response:

The answer is ‘Very simply when you’re armed with a smart phone and choose your moments.’ And no, I did not actually tweet on stage! Yes, Virginia, there are limits.

Do you think live-tweeting during a show could mess with the actor’s concentration? If yes, welcome to the minority. Read Kate Foy’s experience with live-tweeting and the feedback she received, on Groundling.

Some Questions

Theatre-watchers: If you’re given the liberty to use your cell phones for tweeting, would you do it?

Theatre-practitioners: If the annoyance to the rest of the audience wasn’t a concern, would you welcome the idea of audience live-tweeting? Would you live-tweet your own performance? Set aside the distraction of it, isn’t the risk of immediate negative feedback intimidating?

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The second installment was quite different from the earlier one: the bizarre plays were more bizarre, the rowdy ones were more rowdy and the best ones were better. There was more complex lighting; one of the plays went all the way to having a cast of 6 members, some of the stage set was more elaborate.  All in all, this was a more intense installment.

Curiosity got the better of me and I returned to Ranga Shankara at the end of 3 days i.e. Saturday evening to see what the results were this time around. It also made for an excellent opportunity to interact with the performers and volunteers. One of the things that came out is that the performers had little or no idea about each other’s plays and not everyone had seen everyone else’s. The atmosphere today was strangely a little less tense and there were a lot of murmurs around which plays were the favourites.

This week’s results were quite different from last week’s. For one, the top 3 audience choices were announced in reverse order. The first choice was ahead by a huge margin. Then it was the turn for the judges’ choice and this is where things got interesting. The first two of the judge’s choice were the same as the first two of the audience’s but in reverse order. So the 3rd & 4th choices of the judges were announced to decide which play goes to the next round. The 3rd choice of the jury matched with that of the audience. The consistent voting pattern of the second installment unlike the first one is what makes me believe the best ones were from this week.

And now for the finals: it is almost like watching a sporting event where you’d want to go cheer for your favourite team. The competition is going to be brutal and I can’t imagine the pain the audience has to go through when the voting happens and what the performers have to go through during the show. The bad news is that the 7:30pm tickets are already sold out and only a few for the 3:30pm show are left (counters open at 10:30am). I’m still undecided if I intend to go see the performances again but I’m certainly going to try and make it for the final results. I wish the very best of luck to all the troupes.

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There is no set theme connecting the various plays neither can one find an overlap in the participants across the plays. This gives us a nice mix ranging from borderline sitcoms to some fairly dark themes. The time limit forces the screenplay and direction to be extremely efficient and cut out the dull moments that one encounters ever so often in a 100+ minute show. It also requires them to go easy on the props, the number of actors, characters and the scene changes. The plays featured this weekend had a largely humorous tone even in a few cases where the premise of the story was a bit grim. The languages covered wide ground: the plays had a mix of pure Hindi, Hinglish, Kannada+English (Kinglish sounds too weird a word), English English, Indian English, and any other variants you can imagine. The same goes for the scripts: originals, adaptations, occidental ones as is, regional and the list goes on. The whole thing makes a reviewer’s job hard since going into the specifics of one or even a few of plays would seem unfair. All I can say is that I really loved most of them (7 for those you thinking I’m just trying to be polite) and certainly look forward to seeing more of this. The only cruel part is that this is actually a competition of sorts and it feels sad to see a bunch of them getting voted out in the end. If you think you aren’t going to be a reviewer yourself, then you are wrong again as the expectation is that you vote at the end for exactly one of the 10 plays.

And now for some technicalities. The stagehands do have a high pressure job switching the scenes in between the runs. One can actually find a large number of small markings on the stage that helps them out (if you are interested in the mechanics of running a show). Lights and sound also happen to be done by the same set of folks across all the pieces.

This weekend (Feb 25-26) featured 10 plays and another set of 10 is slated for the coming week. In fact, the counting of the votes and announcement of the results happened right at the end of the show I saw and it and the entire atmosphere after the show was an event in itself worth watching as the drama unfolded (pun unintended). There were two plays chosen by the jury and two by the entire audience. The 3rd place from jury section actually made it in the top two of the audience choice and vice versa. The top two themselves from either category had no overlap. The final showdown is slated for Sunday the 4th of March but there is another round of 10 plays in the fray that shall be performed before that. So in case you couldn’t make it this weekend, you haven’t missed all the action.

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Philippa Vafadari, the creative director of Bandbazi who also plays the role of Rosa in Mind Walking, talks to us about the making of the play.

Shuchi: What prompted the choice of subject – an old man losing his mind, in an alien land?

Philippa: I am half Iranian and met an old Iranian man in a dementia care home who had forgotten his English and only spoke Farsi. I speak ok Farsi and when I spoke to him he wept. Where was he? Iran aged 10? Who knows. He was in an English home with nothing familiar around him. My mother and my siblings don’t speak Farsi. What would happen to our family if my dad lost his English?

Shuchi: What challenges did you face in bringing the script to stage?

Philippa: Justifying the use of the hoop in the piece. Making sure the Parsi references were clear to those who didn’t know anything about them  – that is, most UK audience members.

Shuchi: How were the actors chosen? Were all of them skilled aerialists when they were cast?

Philippa: I am the only aerialist in the cast. The others were chosen for their acting skills. Peter was also cast because his father was Indian.

Shuchi: Do all of Bandbazi’s productions involve aerial performance? Do you have scripts tailor-made for your productions or do you adapt them to your style?

Philippa: We always use an aerial metaphor. We tend to devise our own work, with John Binnie as our writer. The commission for Tanika Gupta was our first external commission. She wrote the play with the hoop as an image from the outset.

Shuchi: The background score for Mind Walking was an interesting mix of different styles, notably the very Indian hoop theme. We’d like to know more.

Philippa: The hoop theme was Ravi Shankar’s Pather Panchali film score. Tanika wanted this as it was more Indian in feel. The music for the Zoroastrian priest and the final Parsi suit was ancient Persian bagpipe music – linking Bobbie with his heritage in Persia. The Elgar is quintessentially English for his voyage to the UK. The Beatles was Bobbie and Moira’s song when they first met.

Shuchi: The aerial hoop could have been controlled via a behind-the-stage device, couldn’t it? Instead, the rigging was placed right on stage, visible to the audience. Why so?

Philippa: We didn’t want people to wonder what was happening offstage. The hoop was to be a character with us – Bobbie’s memories and our shared Persian/Parsi heritage.

Shuchi: Did you prepare yourself differently for staging Mind Walking in India after its opening shows in UK?

Philippa: Only practical things such as not bringing heavy set props, floor-cloth and wardrobe. This made the show more stripped down. The lighting was simplified as well.

[Above: A scene from Mind Walking, with the entire cast in view.]

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• Review: Mind Walking
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The story of an old man whose degenerating brain keeps wandering into a pretty predictable past, doesn’t make for the most exciting plot. What holds the play together is some top-notch acting – and the very interesting use of a hoop.

Right in the center of the stage hangs this hoop. It has no physical existence in the context of the play. We see it; the characters in Mind Walking (except the one hallucinating) do not. The hoop is a doorway to the old man Bobbie (played beautifully by Peter D’Souza)’s thoughts – he steps through it, and he steps into the world his mind has brought alive for him. The hoop is also the dock that the other characters stop at to give vent to their angst. The more intense the angst, the more bizarre Bobbie’s delirium, the wilder the spin of the hoop.

Bobbie’s thoughts venture into territory he has kept away from his family. The promos promised "secrets and hidden stories" tumbling out of Bobbie’s mouth – don’t hold your breath for them. Apart from the first revelation, the rest that follows isn’t terribly surprising. His recounting of life in India can be picked out from a Book of Clichés. The central conflict, revealed in the end, can be seen a mile off. [Since this is an Indo-British collaboration, it may have been a conscious decision to keep the Indian context simple for overseas audiences.]

The only anecdote that stuck out was the little one about Noel Coward – did he really visit Bobbie’s Mumbai home or was Bobbie making that up? If he did, why exactly was he rude to his mother?

Where Mind Walking is most effective is in bringing out the helplessness of Bobbie’s family as they try to make sense of his ramblings. You feel for the daughter’s horror when he mistakes her for his mother, and in another scene at the hospital, her delight when he recognizes her as Rosa. Philippa Vafadari who plays the daughter is a treat to watch emote, especially when she is manoeuvring the hoop. Incidentally, she is also the founder and creative director of the group behind the play, Bandbazi – the word is Persian for "trapeze".

The conversations play out very well. My favourite is one in which the grandson ((Dylan Kennedy) tries to get Bobbie to talk of his cultural identity, and Bobbie is off on a tangent speaking about other things. It is a frustrating conversation till suddenly their lines connect. Another high point is the emotionally charged dialogue between mother and son, both hoisted on the hoop.

Central to the story is the 40-year long marriage between Bobbie and Moira (Kate Dyson). Moira is a model of compassion and deals with Bobbie’s senility with better humour and nerve than the children, a welcome antithesis to the daughter’s torment.

Caring for the elderly and watching them wither can be a devastating experience. Mind Walking deals with the subject with great poignancy and sensitivity. One wishes that every aging person gets a family like Bobbie’s to take care of them.

Notes:

1. How impressive it is when actors wipe off years from themselves with just a change of expressions and posture. Bobbie (Peter D’Souza) and Moira (Kate Dyson) seem effortlessly youthful in the memories of their early days of courtship. I’m also reminded of Love Letters with Rajat Kapoor and Shernaz Patel, in which they show the passage of years without even stepping away from the stage.

2. Special applause for the man linked to the hoop, walking up and down a ladder on the side of the stage to control its movements. No less a performance than that of the four actors on stage.

3. I saw Mind Walking at Jagriti Theatre in Bangalore. It’s a nice and small theatre space, just right for a play with minimal props and an intimate character.

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• Behind the scenes of Mind Walking: In conversation with Philippa Vafadari
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Subtitles in a play? This was a new one.

They managed it with large screens along the sides of the stage to display English translations of the actors’ dialogues. With that aid, the audience in Bangalore could follow the Korean play without hiccups.

When I hear my friends rave about Neenaanaadrenaaneenena? or Mysooru Mallige, I wish for a bridge across the language gap – and my mind harks back to The Tale of Haruk.

Why is subtitling, adopted so ardently in films, virtually unheard of in theatre? Someone from the Other Side of theatre would be better qualified to answer that but I can think of a few reasons.

In film, the visuals and subtitles lie within the same frame of reference – a single screen. In theatre, it can be tricky to have subtitles legible from a distance and yet not obstruct the scene of action. To read subtitles with a play, the audience will have to shift focus from the stage to the subtitles and back, over and over – not the most conducive for undisturbed viewing.

Film also has the advantage of constancy. Subtitle it once and it is done forever. But theatre changes every time you view it. To achieve a high level of synch in a live performance is no mean task, harder still in plays that rely on improvisation.

These challenges did not weigh heavily on The Tale Of Haruk – it was not a dialogue-intensive play and the little there was of speech, was succinct and simple.

Does this mean that subtitling and full-blown live drama cannot mix?

It sure can, and it is being experimented with.

ScienceDaily.com talks of a Spanish university that has developed a software for live subtitling to enable the hearing impaired to enjoy theatre. All the accessibility elements – titles, sign language video and audio description – are pre-recorded and manually synchronized by a technician during the show. The technician need not even be present at the venue but can follow the play anywhere via VoIP, and broadcast the elements over various channels. What’s more, says the article:

…because of the high degree of compatibility of the chosen formats, the play’s audience can simultaneously consult them from different devices: mobile phone, PC tablet, PDA, etc.

Read more about the tool UC3MTitling here: New System for Live Subtitles Debuts in Spanish Theater.  [Thanks Sreekanth for sharing this link.]

EndGadget.com describes a device with multi-lingual support for live subtitling, which was being trialed at the Shaftesbury in central Londonium in 2009.

… it combines a simple WiFi-enabled device with an LED-backlit screen and a dude in the background who feeds live subtitles over the air. The pleasure of said dude’s services will be a steep £6 ($10), which you might scoff at now, but imagine yourself attending a show in Tokyo or Beijing and suddenly the price becomes a lot more justifiable.

No updates on how far these trials were successful. Read the full article here: .AirScript translator beams live theater subtitles over the air.

What do you say, theatre practitioners in India? Given our plethora of languages, real-time translation of performances has sure scope and need. The question is – is it practicable?

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