Shakespeare and vanilla cola

Since Monday last, neighbours report, I have been walking the corridors of my humble Indian co-operative housing society, wringing my hands by moonlight and trying to wash the blood off—Shakespeare’s blood that is. My side of the story is that Puck spoke in Malayalam, and the pitch of the ‘Tittania’ is what sunk the titanic. This week that passed saw two plays one comedy, and another tragedy, one by a British director, another by an Indian one. Both attempt to infuse a raw, earthy sexuality into the fuddy-duddiness that may have come to be associated with a puritan Shakespeare. Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle towards my hand?
Liken the effect to buying bottles of cola, some of which have lime, some have coffee, some vanilla, and one day will they have god knows what floating bits about in it. The sales of these often excellent beverages though a wonderfully exciting, background music outlined, multi million dollar advertising campaign, for the most part, I believe the classic has never quite been rewritten, and is as much endearing as the self same Titania when enamoured of an ass.
Adaptations and interpretations of theatre are necessary evils, nay, unavaoidable, for it is beyond the ability of man to resist an opportunity to turn around another man’s perspective and view it as his own. Put that in an Indian setting and how can we resist telling Shakespeare how he should have done it? Ask the Kumars at No 10. They would have taken him home and cooked his goose with an aubergine thrown in for good measure.
And out of the entire body of art and performing arts, has grown a body of criticism that insists no man is island, and no perspective isolated in experience. So while TS Eliot sat on that theory, he, born into the age of over analysis and smart alec over interpretation, infused so many influences into his works that to find a novice reading the works without the notes he generously left behind signals no less a miracle than the rebirth of the author’s genius himself.
Shakespeare, on the other hand, like many artists around him, did not have the foresight to leave detailed instructions on his works were not to be interpreted. His soothsayers could not have possibly foreseen the corporatisation of King Lear or the industrial family feuds of Ceasar, let alone the tantricisation of Macbeth and the malkhambisation of the fairies. The gymnastics and the acrobatics, the musical expansion of words are fine theatrics, brilliant plays of regional language, translations as fine and poignant as the original. Tim Supple provided a brilliant scaffolding to a Midsummer Night’s Dream. And Shakespeare was caged in the network beneath the torn paper, for the play would not stand to an audience that had not read or seen the original, and that was not translating the words in their head, or deriving the relationships as the play moved along.
The danger in reinterpretation, is the danger of losing the context—think about it, which self respecting woman in today’s day and age would throw herself on a sword for a Hamlet—a sore 30 year old jobless loser, perpetually plagued by self-doubt, spineless, not to mention talks to himself and a chronic insomniac— not quite on a desperation. And yet, Hamlet remains an empathetic character ironically built to a strength.
Interpreting a Rembrandt is much like tasting a fine wine. You have your preferences, but eventually, if you haven’t nosed the bouquet, you haven’t quite got it, no matter how nice your version of it sounds. While abstract art may be your buzzword for the century, that form of art is, sorry to burst your bubble, to be abstracted the way the artist chose to present it and not, contrary to popular opinion the way it strikes each passing patron, no matter how intelligent that patron’s opinion of it must be.
The beauty of the Monalisa lies in that neither you nor I know what she is smiling about, or not for that matter. And the gap between the credibility of one’s own interpretation of her and the truth of the artists’ intention remains ostentatiously too large to be bridged. The lack of nailing it is what leaves the spectator hustling down the line with the sense of the artist’s superiority. And that smug smile is his, not just hers. Which is probably how Shakespeare feels right now anyhow.