In this age of world turmoil, where every other headline is about war, destruction, abuse of power and the hatred of multiple individuals for their neighbors, William Shakespeare has become a voice as contemporary and true as when his plays were first written for the audiences of Elizabethan England.

Personally, I have recently been privy to two renditions of the Bard’s tragedies that have managed to transform and evolve his stories into tales as up-to-date as today’s news. First, last May at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Kuwaiti director Sulayman El-Bassam presented his ‘Richard III: An Arab Tragedy’, and succeeded in making the story of the maniacal despot with control issues even more understandable by translating it into Arabic - with supertitles in simple English - and setting it in a fictitious Gulf country during modern times, all the while hinting heavily at that now-deposed and deceased Iraqi leader with a taste for dictatorship. 

But the award for most magically creative and positively groundbreaking interpretation of Shakespeare goes to Rajat Kapoor’s production of ‘Hamlet - The Clown Prince’ which recently played in Delhi to enthusiastic audiences at Epicenter and Habitat Center and a sold-out crowd during the NSD Festival. With its simplified — yet touching — retelling of the Prince of Denmark’s family struggles and inner turmoil as well as inventive re-staging, brilliant performances and creative casting (now THAT is an understatement!) using actors as clowns, it’s no wonder the production got standing ovations from its spectators each and every time!

The play opens with an atmospherically dark stage, the top-lit silhouette of a man standing while his fellow actors quickly weave in and out of the stage, nervously crisscrossing, spewing their own gestured anxieties on him and attempting to bring him into their pantomimed dramas. He – whom we later come to know as Soso the clown and Hamlet in the play-within-the-play — continues standing, still and unperturbed. Then he launches into a creative version of that most recognizable of soliloquies in a mixture of gibberish and English — which surprisingly make up the accessible language of ‘Hamlet - The Clown Prince’. With the light shining down on his hat, he is a faceless man, combining undeniable pathos with heartfelt humor and poignant narration.

If you can imagine the vibrancy of a Fellini film, with some of the mime charm of Monsieur Hulot thrown in, infused with a lot of Charlie Chaplin’s melancholic clown sensitivity, mixed with a dose of Roberto Benigni’s lovable fool and even steeped in Woody Allen’s self-deprecating wit, then you are on the right track to understanding the full extent of this production’s genius.

As fantastic as Kapoor’s concept itself is, ‘Hamlet - The Clown Prince’ truly belongs to the actors performing the difficult task of playing clowns within the tragedy. Their individual talents, as well as diverse personalities, shine through to make the story poignant and the emotions so real that I found myself laughing uncontrollably in one instant, only to replace the laughter with tears in the next.

Hamlet is played by the clown Soso, who in turn is interpreted by the great Atul Kumar. Although I was deeply tempted to stay after the show and meet the actors out of their make-up, I think I was right in cutting out at the last minute, since the magic of the evening and their characters will now stay with me for years to come. Rajat Kapoor smiled facetiously when he warned me that “they all look quite different, you won’t recognize them” but for me it was even deeper than finding out their true physical appearance. Of course, Soso is not the typical romantic hero — and neither is the clown Fido, who plays Claudius (as well as the Ghost of the King) and played with verve and panache by Neil Bhoopalam — but behind the farcical make up and absurd costumes, there was true passion, real feelings and human reactions which made them appear strangely handsome and captivating. I delighted in watching the Ghost scene between Kumar, with his range of moods and antihero charm, and Bhoopalam, with his fluid dance moves and hilarious charades, maybe even more than I care to admit.

The cast also includes two women, Rachel D’Souza who plays the clown Fifi and then becomes Ophelia to Soso’s Hamlet and Puja Sarup as Bouzo, also playing Hamlet’s mom Gertrude. While D’Souza’s charming vulnerability as the junior clown is only rivaled by her ability to play Ophelia’s romantic disappointment — thus leading to her demise — with tragic melancholy, Sarup’s Bouzo is laugh-out-loud funny, with her sassy French accent, her heart-shaped cheek rouge, constant jabs at her sometime-lover Soso and coquettish ways. At one point, she begins unabashedly flirting with a male member of the audience and throws her red garter at him. In fact, it is often in Kapoor’s production that the invisible barrier between actors and their audience is broken, to brilliant results. Soso and his troupe tease the crowd and pick on a few spectators in the first couple of rows of the theater, both as light fare and during some of the more serious moments in the play. The cast is then rounded out by the master of ceremonies Popo — who then takes on the role of Laertes — played masterfully by Sujay Saple and Namit Das as Nemo, the shy, cute clown who in turn becomes Polonius.  

Ridden with double entendres, modern-day culture references — Fido mistakes the name Gonzago for ‘Godzilla’, is constantly belting out ‘The Circle of Life’ from ‘Lion King’ and even delivers the Joker’s infamous “Why so serious?!” line from ‘the Dark Night’ – and sharp-witted explanations of Shakespeare’s lines — Soso, pointing to the bigger than life, flamboyant Bouzo says as an aside to the audience “You know the line ‘Frailty, thy name is Woman’ Shakespeare wrote? It is about THIS woman!”, this is one play that I was glad to sit through twice and would be delighted to watch twice more, and then again…

Finally, what I bring to Shakespeare is a deep connection through my deceased Grandfather Hans, who was a well-respected translator of the Bard into German and taught me to love his intricate storylines early on in life. My Granddad also made sure that I always understood the humor hidden within Shakespeare’s poetic wording and the poetry of his lyrical speeches. This is probably why I am the biggest critic of productions that take Shakespeare’s beautiful plays and beat them to the ground with their lack of imagination and pompously delivered language. I believe that it is exactly within the alchemy of transforming his work and by recreating his magic in a way that appeals to a modern audience that the Bard is guaranteed to live on, through his ever-contemporary themes and commentary on human nature. 

‘Hamlet - The Clown Prince’ possesses the alchemy, the magic and wit to deliver the tale of the Prince of Denmark to audiences all over the world, for many, many years to come.