An actor, director, and playwright, Rajat Kapoor he has consistently pushed boundaries with the plays he adapts, the roles he performs, and the stories he tells. As Delhi gears up for the sixth edition of the Delhi Theatre Festival, Kapoor’s 2024 play Karamjale Brothers is finally making its Delhi premiere. Last month, he took the play to Russia, where it was performed at the Baltic Theatre Festival in St. Petersburg.
Adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the production — set in Delhi — brings together a talented ensemble cast, including Kapoor’s longtime collaborator Vinay Pathak, Radhika Mehrotra, Chandrachoor Rai, and Saurabh Nayyar.
Known for his English adaptations of Shakespeare — Macbeth, Hamlet: The Clown Prince, Nothing Like Lear, and I Don’t Like It As You Like It, Kapoor now returns to Hindi theatre after almost 25 years. “It was a break — from clowns, from Shakespeare; also, it gave me a chance to work with actors I hadn’t been able to collaborate with before because of the language barrier,” he says.
Excerpts from a conversation ahead of its premiere today at Delhi’s OP Jindal Auditorium:
By setting it in Delhi, what cultural texture did you want to bring to the story?
The idea of setting the play somewhere in north India was to retain the sense of cold that pervades the book. Once we decided that, it was an easy step to finalise Delhi as the locale, since I am familiar with the city. The Karamazovs became the Karamjales; Fyodor became Faujdar, Mitya became Meet, Ivan became Iman, and so on. A few local specifics here and there helped us root the play firmly in Delhi.
The Brothers Karamazov is such a dense and layered novel. What challenges did you face in condensing it into a 100-minute play?
The entire struggle during the making of the play was to not lose the essence of the book. This was the biggest challenge — and also the most exciting part: how do you stage a play based on such a gargantuan work, and what parts do you leave out? The book is many things at once — a whodunit, a love story, a thesis on faith (or the lack of it).
You once said you “wanted to get away from realism” because theatre isn’t real life. What, to you, makes something theatrical rather than realistic?
Theatre, if left to itself, will always find an expression that is supra-real. The problem arises when we try to superimpose a kind of realism onto it, which, I feel, goes against the very grain of the medium. I do not enjoy realistic sets, the pretense of real characters on stage, actors pretending that a fourth wall exists, or anything else that suggests we are watching people in their drawing rooms.
The novel was written over a century ago — what made you feel it still speaks to audiences today?
One often returns to the classics because there is always something new to be discovered in them. These books and plays speak to us even today because they deal with what is elemental — truths we continue to recognise centuries later. Of course, when one adapts anything, there must be a transposition of space: the Russia of the nineteenth century now becomes present-day Delhi.
What kind of effort and collaboration has gone into writing, directing, and the production of Karamjale Brothers?
It took several months of rehearsals, improvisations, and auditions, during which the actors often didn’t know until very late which roles they would be playing. There was no written text for them to work with; they were creating the play alongside me. It was tough, but I was fortunate to work with some exceptionally talented and dedicated actors. I would also like to acknowledge the music composer, Aditya, whose score adds tremendous weight and emotional depth to the performance, bringing Dostoevsky's world to life.