Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry on how words empower the story

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

Can there be a single perspective for any event? Two people in an identical situation generally interpret their participation in completely different ways. For example, my experience in an overcrowded bus, a long wait at the gas station, a sudden downpour without an umbrella may vary from the person next to me going through the same events at the same time. When we refer to momentous events, war, brutality, injustice, there is no single narrative, no single interpretation and no single approach and, certainly, no single opinion. The world has become noisy with a cacophonous range of voices that varies from the absurd to the bewildering.

In this context, the film ‘Rashomon’ comes to mind, due to its emphasis on the subjectivity of truth and the uncertainty of factual accuracy. The film, directed by Akira Kurosawa, shows a murder witnessed by four people who give contradictory interpretations of the same incidents. All are speaking the truth, or what they imagine is the truth, triggering a debate about subjectivity versus objectivity in human perception, memory and reporting. A story or text could be considered dead when there is an absence of exchange, a sense of closure. A good work of art, I believe, is about movement, about the power of the story determined by its migration across cultures.

A playwright is the poet, the metaphysician, the historian. However, once the play has been received by an audience, it has a life of its own that goes beyond the intentions of the playwright and the director. Words are empty shells unless you transform them into vehicles of connections. It’s not only a question of feeling, but also of showing. One can’t show what one doesn’t know or what one can’t imagine, and in order to communicate the text, a director must have chemistry with the text, internalise it and transform it into something real. On the other hand, an actor is a person who experiences a transmutation with the written word and infuses the lines with his experience, memory and emotions. It is important to recognise that the interactions between the text, director, actor and the audience constitute a totally new irreducible element.

When Vishal Bhardwaj directs ‘Haider’, ‘Omkara’ and ‘Maqbool’, he transports Shakespeare to Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and the Mumbai underworld, without losing connection with the essential essence of the narrative. Does the text cease to belong to Shakespeare, or does he as an artist free himself from formulaic stereotyping, infusing fresh blood and vigour to a Shakespearean text?

Interpreting and looking is authorised and one has a right to be curious. Then you ask yourself, what would Shakespeare have done if he were to write the text today? Would he treat his text as sacred and unchangeable, or recognise its fluidity?

When you change, chop, rearrange and reinterpret text, the anxiety is about rights and permissions. How does one go to Shakespeare or Jean Racine and seek permission? The query that emerges: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? My answer is that we cannot unless we are working directly with the playwright, as I did for 35 years with the inspirational Surjit Patar, who not only translated the plays of Federica Garcia Lorca, Jean Racine, Rabindranath Tagore, Girsh Karnad and Toni Morrison and many more into Punjabi, but also localised, vernacularised and regionalised the text. Under his magical pen, translation ceased to remain an intermediary activity but became a creative act by itself.

Jean Racine’s play ‘Phaedra’, translated by Patar as ‘Fida’, examines the question of who is faithful to whom. In ‘Phaedra’, everyone is unfaithful to everyone, and yet the main question is that everyone has a desire for fidelity. Phaedra, dammed by history and myth, had been represented as a woman who lusted for her son. Through the production translated by Patar, Phaedra is slowly dismantled from her mythic image and seen as a woman’s urge for a love that was outside the limits of conventionality.

The structure of the play was made flexible enough for allowing myth, magic and philosophy to segue together, through montage, non-linear time, simultaneous action, songs, dancing, chorus. Many times, most of us fear to re-examine classical texts, as they get so encased in canonical production styles that it almost seems that the characters are suspended in a world sealed from time. Patar unlocked that and ‘Phaedra’ or ‘Fida’ was made relevant, relatable and impervious to the confines of time.

Many people believe that theatre is a place where an actor recites a written text, illustrating it with a series of movements and actions in order to make it understood. Interpreted this way, theatre became an accessory to dramatic literature. Ideally, the play is a beginning and not an end to interpretation.

Does the playwright put in every moment of silence, intake of breath, inflection, quality, texture and tone in the words, or the pauses between them? A word begins as an impulse stimulated by a feeling, an idea, an attitude. It contains within it an intricate web of meaning, interpreted and transformed in various ways. The meaning can change from the playwright to the director and inside the actor. The word is really a tiny, invisible, unseen formation, containing memory and a remembrance.

Every word that is written has a history that is older than the tongue that has spoken it and every myth has had many masters. In this way, we can see that the images that appear in any play are drawn from multiple cultural sources and, therefore, each play has many authors even before it is brought to life through performance. I am drawn to the many voices that speak through the text.

Theatre is about narratives, about telling a story, about transforming the written word into characters, sounds, pauses, movements, body language. The literary text then metamorphoses into a performative experience when the director and the actor pull out the invisible from it. The invisible is hidden, subterranean, intangible, and creates the meta text or the subtext. Words are like ciphers on paper and it is through performance that they come alive.