The story continues: Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry on reinterpreting plays according to the times

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

“Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.” — Salman Rushdie

We all love stories, and nurture a strong desire to share them. Stories exist in everything we see, touch and feel. Stories can be metaphorical, imaginative or brim over with fictive reality. We weave stories around shapes and images that we see in clouds, water puddles; searching for narratives in abstract forms. Stories exist in the way our body moves, sits, talks, eats, enters or exits.

The image that comes to my mind is of a ‘magic hat’ and stories like rabbits breed and multiply in the fertile land of the imagination. From rusty trunks, old letters, faded photographs, musty clothes, sepia books, fusty shawls, in fact all sorts of memorabilia have stories tucked in the crevices. If only they could speak! If only we could hear!

It’s really about what you see and how you see. It is also about interpretation and trust, it’s about listening. It’s not what happened, it’s about how we imagined what happened. A complex arrangement of the mind and heart that reshuffles, reassembles facts and tosses them in the cauldron of one’s imagination.

Anne Frank, a Jewish girl born in Germany, kept a diary in which she documented her life in hiding under Nazi persecution in the Netherlands. Her ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ became a symbol of innocence and hope in desolate times. It motivated many young girls of my generation to pen their thoughts, emotions and desires in a ‘Dear Diary’ syndrome. It was a delicious affliction, and we held our diaries close to our hearts; scribbling stories and poems that were hidden and private, containing grand secrets.

These influences became fodder for one’s imagination and fed creative work through the archives of memory. Directing a play has never been a mechanical act. It’s not about taking a story and blocking the movements and making actors mouth the lines. A story that connects with you on many levels is the story you wish to share. You take that story, claim it, remix it, process it and combine it with your references and understanding. Then the question is, who does it belong to? The playwright, director or the actors?

While directing a play, you have to believe that you are inventing a world for the stage. Even though each story reflects the times we live in, it’s a stage world. The attempt is to make the performance a mini society, where questions are raised and uncertainties defined and articulated. If it succeeds even a fraction, then theatre functions as a community, as well as a vibrant enterprise for each of its participants.

I recently directed a play called ‘Tamasha’ in Malayalam for the University of Calicut in Thrissur, devising stories from the writings of Saadat Hasan Manto. While reading the stories, I could not shake away the images of Israel and Gaza. This overriding leitmotif was the terrifying human destruction that wars generate. As Manto has been the springboard of my earlier works, many stories that I had directed were part of the show. While processing them for this particular performance, something flipped within. References had changed, as had the context! In one of the stories, ‘100 Watt Bulb’, a prostitute who is sleep-deprived by her pimp kills him, laments and laughs intermittently, with her emotions hovering between grief and relief. In this rendition, raw brutal savagery was in evidence on a scale where the specifics become universal and the ‘howls’ of the woman encapsulate the pain of all the women on whose bodies wars are fought.

Another experience of how a story changes with time comes from my three versions of the play ‘Naga-Mandala’, written by Girish Karnad. This play was directed initially in 1989 based on a Punjabi translation by Surjit Patar and with music by BV Karanth. In 2005, the play went through a rebirth due to an invite by Karnad to showcase it in Karnataka. As many years had passed, my initial work looked dated, stale and lugubrious. No, there can never be a retrospective of theatre, as I believe a play is rooted in the ‘now’ both for the performer and the audience. Because of this belief, a fresh production was created, and the interpretation of this famous play went through a somersault. As the playwright/translator/music director and cast were the same, it was a tough journey to traverse.

A few years later, in 2014, I again received a similar invite. The earlier success of the play made the actors cling to the memory of what had been created and did not wish to explore fresh impulses. Challenges were strewn and old habits had to be sloughed off for a fresh take on this modern classic! The shy, timid wife was emboldened now. She was not going to accept the brute force of patriarchy. She became defiant, subversive and exulted in her world of desire. The snake lover, who assumes the guise of her husband in this game of charades, has the protagonist wilfully participate. The naïve Rani of 1989 had become an emboldened ’feminist’ in 2014.

I believe that a story is never a fixed entity, it is open, fluid and vulnerable to an ever-evolving interpretation. It has the power to be viewed in multiple ways, travelling through time, geographies and cultures. A question comes to my mind, is art more than a personal expression? Do you as an artist carry the voices of many? Is it singular, multiple, plural and complex? I think the voice starts from the singular and slowly builds up to a crescendo of many voices. Then that singular voice becomes multitudinous. “Two sisters saw out from the same window. One saw stars, the other saw mud.” I forget the source, but this quote hangs in my head.