Hamlet by Kaushik Sen

Aparajito presents Hamlet by Kaushik Sen. Starring Riddhi Sen in the titular role, the play features Koushik Sen and Reshmi Sen as Claudius and Gertrude, respectively, and Surangana Bandopadhyay as Ophelia. The production, put together by the thirty-year-old theatre collective Swapnasandhani, has been playing houseful shows since last year.

Though the script largely stays faithful to William Shakespeare’s play, a crucial aspect has been inspired by Jacques Derrida's 1993 work Specters of Marx. “A lot of the play is close to the original text. However, the play approaches Hamlet's father's ghost differently, without revealing everything. It could be said that it has been inspired by Derrida's Spectres of Marx,” Surangana shared. The actor further added, “With Hamlet, the play's soul lies in how an actor decides to play Hamlet itself. How Riddhi decided to make the character of Hamlet evolve on stage has made the play evolve accordingly as well. The rest is up to the audience to interpret.”

“I’ve always imagined Hamlet as an adolescent. Some of the things he does are pure juvenilia, though whenever I watch the play, his age ceases to matter. There is an excellent rendition by Tony Richardson with Nicol Williamson playing him as a bespectacled, bearded, white-streaked research scholar, and of course, everyone knows of Sarah Bernhardt in 1899. For me, Riddhi Sen’s performance would have benefitted from a little more stillness and silences, but overall, it is a pleasure to report that what I watched was a confident actor with a secure understanding of his craft that I, for one, certainly didn’t have at the age of 24. All I had was the unharnessed, roiling energy and complete sense of anarchy he brought to the part. I would have preferred an unhurried quality, but his neurotic, restless, unsentimental performance was strangely moving.

Koushik, who straddled the responsibilities of designing the set, choreographing the action, directing, and playing Claudius, had a tougher job on his hands. However, he coped well, not drawing attention to himself or his brilliant mise en scène, helped immensely by Sudip Sanyal’s adventurous lighting scheme, and not playing Claudius as a villain but rather as an insecure man unsure of the implications of his actions. The emotional charge was more than adequately provided by Reshmi Sen as Gertrude, and Surangana Banerjee was particularly convincing in the most difficult scene of Ophelia’s madness.

As wonderful as it was watching actors perform with joy and gusto instead of treating it as a job, I did find myself wondering about the flexibility of the production. The Academy’s theatre suited its design perfectly, but I had doubts about other venues. Koushik should not forget that “when Shakespeare played, there was heard the bright unclouded summer of the word” in the theatre, and his actors performed on a bare stage. Perhaps he could, having grasped the guts of this play, attempt some experiments with it so that it gets across to those who despise or are befuddled by Shakespeare — schoolchildren, for one! This production deserves to be seen by all. Lest we forget, WS wrote popular plays for the common man; that the intelligentsia co-opted him is another matter.”

— Naseeruddin Shah