When it was first performed in Italy in 1921, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author caused riots on the streets of Rome. Orio Vergani, an eye-witness to the aftermath of the first performance, wrote: “Beautiful women, with painted lips, jeered and repeated: madhouse!
Elegant young men with white ties sneered and shouted insults [...]” Despite its early reception, or rather, rejection, the play has been performed globally and repeatedly over the last century, with stellar actors in key roles—Ralph Fiennes played the Producer in a 1987 production. Eminent thespian and activist MK Raina has brought the play to Delhi with a Hindi production: Lekhak Ki Khoj Mein Kirdar.
Shouldered by a superb cast--Rakesh Kumar Singh, Kavita Seth, Arti Nayar, Aradhana Singh, Pakhi Sinha and others -- this unforgettable Indian production of a classic Italian play that redirected the trajectory of modern European drama in the 20th century is a clarion call in many ways.
Pirandellism meets Rainaism
About the contentious themes of the play, Raina says: “The morality back then was something else, right after World War I—and the play is very much an outcome of that era and its complex revelations. We don’t expect any riots now,” he says with a laugh, adding somewhat morosely that the once “absurd” themes in the play seem to have become part of ‘normalcy’. Its controversial elements were difficult to digest a hundred years ago, but its thematic complexities are no longer as bewildering, he says.
The ‘plot’ or action of the play is this: as the actors of a theatre company are about to perform a play—interestingly, another Pirandello production—six characters interrupt them and describe themselves as incomplete characters in search of an author who may write their story to completion, and produce it for the stage.
Reality and fiction conflate in a jarring, salacious narrative, in which the six characters—who form a discordant family among themselves, tied by blood—offer disturbing details about adultery, prostitution, nudity and potential incest among its members. Raina chose the play, he suggests, for its ability to represent the unpleasant and yet real horrors of our world—the ones we are quick to “push to the periphery” because they challenge our manicured, even if delusional, reality.
For Raina, theatre has always been a means to communicate with society, a means to pose hard questions. He tells us: “My entire process and motivation come from one question: Why am I doing theatre? I have to talk about the times I am in. And if I see reflections of these times in history, poetry, literature, you will see me talking about them via the medium of theatre…. Art can be easily relegated to museums as artefacts for us to gawk at, but it should rather interact and engage with our own times.”
The fall of Delhi’s theatres
To carry the Italian play to an Indian setting and audience—it will be performed at the Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre, 7 pm onwards tonight—Raina has worked with his characteristic inventiveness to stay honest to the original but also depart from it in truly remarkable ways. He transposes the plot and setting, but also introduces a brilliant new ending inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in which the ‘wall’ between the stage and the audience is broken down to chilling effects.
The attempt to produce this play, however, has not been easy. “We had to think about a play that we could practically afford to do. We are facing a strange situation where space is denied to genuine culture and theatre in Delhi. Various theatres have increased the rents to exorbitant rates, which has made these spaces inaccessible to us.
And the kind of theatre that we do, which is educative and socially relevant, for that, the space has shrunk.” An unsuspecting observer would imagine that the solution would be to rake in as many visitors as these performances can manage, to recover hefty expenses. When we ask Raina why he does not produce “massy” plays, he shrugs first and then chortles.
“We performed Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein for nearly a decade. I have never tried to appeal to the masses, but my plays have found their audiences, and have been popular too. On the principle of form and cotent, I will never compromise.”
Raina tells us that the process of obtaining government grants, too, is Kafkaesque—it drowns the grantees in bureaucratic paperwork. “There’s no government or corporate support for genuine theatre. As a result, theatre groups have disappeared, because there is no money to keep performances going.
Delhi is no more the centre of the dramatic arts in India. Can you imagine that India’s national capital has no state Ator national theatre? There are only the lala’s theatres, which they willingly lease to private institutions for conducting coaching classes. But that doesn’t mean we give it all up, we continue to do what we believe in, and this performance rose out of that spirit.”
Means to an end
Through its action, the play overhauls our understanding of Reality. Raina says: “A character in the play says that a play is about interpretation, that is what we want the audiences to take away from this performance. To interpret this play, which questions the premise of Reality itself, and, in turn, deconstruct their own illusions about what they think is theirs.
We have become so desensitised to the tragedies that surround us, that public anger has lost its meaning and force—nothing scandalises us or angers us anymore. Sane voices are lost in the cacophony. What remains are small pockets that are resisting the status quo. And that’s all we can do, now, it seems, to go to these pockets. What else can you do?”
Kartik Chauhan is a Delhi-based writer