The play is being billed as “Othello: The Sen of Nepal.” Perhaps the idea is that replacing the sooty-bosomed Moor with a Sen suffices as adaptation. This recreates a period, embellished with a pachhyauri. There is the traditional music throbbing or wailing from the wings; there are the headgears and curved swords and khukuris curiously worn unsheathed around the waist; one raucous scene features raksi, and a lot of young men rush through their lines in unintelligible stammers: this is the extent of the adaptation.
The effort that has gone into the production shows: if nothing else, there seemed present passion and purpose. Too much passion is surely to blame for the frenzied rush through their lines by most actors, excepting Abiral Pant as Othello, and either Shazia K.C. or Shristi Ghimire as Desdemona.
The towering failure here was of Iago: Ashraya Dixit commits the most sanguine crime of not showing a unique knowledge of the character he plays. As for the rest, well, no Cassio or Rodrigo or Bianca can salvage an Othello so offhandedly drowned by an Iago.
For most people familiar with the play, Iago is the crux, Iago is Shakespeare’s particular invention for humankind and his gift through Othello. The cuckold was nothing new, but irredeemable evil was a theological problem. In Iago, we ought to be able to see the entire range of evil, from the purposeful to the incidental.
This is possible only if we first give him our credulity, then feel betrayed by the increase in his evil, because he should gradually show us –with words, not curled fists clawing the air for ideas –the enormity and spectacular grandeur of his inventive evil.
We can’t really understand Mr. Dixit: he has no time for the pretty pictures he must seed in our minds; he is a careless gardener of the mess he should fertilize therein. Let the audience hear not just the sound, Mr. Dixit, but also the words, how they join and unmarry, how they carry the palanquins of notions and ideas and the blinding flash of comprehension.
There were very few moments when I forgot that I was watching a performance. This is the crucial test, after all. One moment came with Othello, actually employing pauses and gestures, as opposed to the torrential blabbering of the rest of the cast. The other moment came with Desdemona, as she waits to die. Desdemona was by far the best actor in the opening performance.
Perhaps it is a better idea for Eelum Dixit, the helmsman, to change the name of the group from Nepal Vs Shakes to Nepal & Shakes, and focus on giving us honest Shakespeares rather than weak adaptations. Give us one-man shows in a black box, strip away the trappings, give us the Bard’s words, and give us believable performances.
Give us five solidly spoken soliloquies, and it will be worth the ticket price. You won’t have to do anything on the stage: we offer you our minds, our ears. Sow the work into our minds. I don’t envy you your task: it is difficult, your ambition needs our encouragement or it will flounder. But let us – performers and audience alike – not disrespect each other’s intelligence.
(Prawin Adhikari is a freelancer writer based in Kathmandu.)
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