57. Cheri Jacob K

Abstract 57
Cheri Jacob K  

The (im)possible Dissent of Theatre: Reading/Staging Oru Madhyavenal Pranayaravu

Abstract

P. Balachandran’s Oru Madhyavenal Pranayaravu (A Midsummer Night of Love) has a unique place in the theatre historiography of Kerala. In an avowedly startling move, one encounters on stage a character who professes to be a ‘character colonizer’ – Puck from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream residing within the figure of Kamadeva, the god of love in Indian Mythology. During the course of the play one encounters characters from Kalidasa’s Sakuntala, a play that brings along notions of Indian classical theatre, and also characters from the pastoral elegy Ramanan by the acclaimed Malayalam poet Changampuzha Krishnapilla. Also, the performative space is occupied by characters from Shakespeare’s ‘text’ – Bottom, Quince, Straveling, et al. Alongside one gets glimpses of filmic references, contemporary ‘events,’ and historical echoes that resonate in myriad ways. Finally, one core issue that stands out is the fact that the playwright has used portions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from a ‘translation’ rendered by another prominent Malayalam playwright Kavalam Narayana Panicker.

This paper seeks to open up spaces wherein one can locate the issue of artistic ‘dissent’ that is at the core of Oru Madhyavenal Pranayaravu. Firstly, the intertextuality that is evident at the level of structure forces one to look at the issue of colonization (or is it translation?): Shakespeare and Indian regional traditions of theatre; Classical Indian theatrical assumptions and other desi conceptualizations of post-colonial theatre. Secondly, the ‘idea’ of the ‘(melo)dramatic’ and the ‘tragic’ as it traverses across genres (Drama, poetry, film songs, etc.) in its spatio-temporal dimensions (even as it travels from modernity to postmodernity) urges one to closely read the ways in which the play itself can be seen as a historiographic move that seeks to document and comment (albeit in an ironically oblique way) on the continuities and fissures that inhabit the performance spaces that have evolved and are currently available for circulation in society. Finally, it is also possible to read into the play motifs that would lead us to reconsider and reformulate assumptions regarding theatre and canonicity per se with respect to the social role that serious theatre has been accorded with, down the ages. In this age of extreme spectacle and consumption, can/should we still conceive of a drama that can stake its claims to political commitment and intervention?
Keywords: Artistic Dissent - Hegemonic Cultures- Intertextuality – Canon – Postmodern – Metatheatre – Theatre Historiography – Contrapuntal Reading