KOCHI: Othello, the moor of Venice, is overcome by rage and jealousy. While Desdemona is asleep he enters her bedchamber with a dreadful calmness.
Horrified, she pleads with him to banish her rather than kill her, but Othello in a fit of fury smothers his guiltless wife… For those who expect Elizabethan costumes and English verse there is a slight change. Here the cherubic Desdemona is decked up in kathakali finery and it’s kathakali padams that communicate the ultimate terror of the scene.
For 24-year-old Madhavan Nampoothiri, a kathakali artist and a post graduate in English literature, presenting English plays on stage in the form of kathakali is a passion. He presents Othello’s swift descent into jealousy, Desdemona’s unwavering faith and Iago’s dazzling display of villainy for the kathakali audience within the specific format of the dance drama. “The point is adapting and performing the play within the strict regulations of kathakali without losing its credibility,” he says.
Grandson of celebrated percussionist Madhavan Nampoothiri, one of the famous ‘Varanasi Brothers’ as they are popularly known among kathakali circles, Madhavan had a childhood filled with the sights and sounds of kathakali.
He also inherited the inclination from his father Narayanan Nampoothiri, a chenda and kathakali artist who teaches at Kalamandalam. A guest lecturer at Bishop Moore College, Mavelikara, he has greased his face for more than a thousand stages since his first public performance at the age of 10.
Madhavan who has adapted some of the most feted plays into kathakali format feels that kathakali staging of an English play has an element of risk in itself. “The most strenuous part is to transform the English verse into kathakali padams in poetic Malayalam,” he says. Madhavan says it’s technically impossible to include the myriad characters of a Shakespearean play in kathakali.
His kathakali adaptation of Othello has only Cassio, Iago and Emilia other than Othello and Desdemona.
Another significant modification Madhavan made while translating the plays is avoiding the English names.
“Situations, state of affairs, characters, culture everything is poles apart. When changed to kathakali format the English names sounded inappropriate and unfitting.
I didn’t dare to rename Shakespeare’s eternal characters either. So only adjectives are used in the place of nouns in the kathakali form” he says.
Another challenge he faced was the lack of settings and the strict regulation in kathakali costumes. “Shakespeare’s Iago has deceptive looks. He doesn’t look the monster he actually is. He doesn’t emanate villainy and the demonic depth of his treachery is revealed only towards the last act. But in kathakali Iago appears in kathi vesham, the specific make-up meant for wicked characters, from the very beginning,” he adds.
Madhavan who has appeared on kaliarangu as Dr Faustus and Lady Macbeth says that the most taxing requirement was that almost all plays including Othello and Oedipus Rex demanded an exposition of the psychological realm of characters. “The scope of psychology in kathakali is limited. In fact the introduction of this aspect in kathakali was a novelty and innovation in itself. It was a real challenge to choreograph the scene in which it is revealed that Jocasta is actually Oedipus’ mother in Oedipus Rex. Communicating the dramatic potency of the scene and creating an impact among the audience was a task as the original play is deeply based in psychological confrontations,” says Madhavan who has also presented Olappamanna’s ‘Nangemakutty’ and Kumaranasan’s ‘Karuna’ in kathakali form.
Madhavan who has scripted two attakkathas Agnipareeksha and Satyaswayamvaram feels that scripting is more difficult than acting, especially when you are experimenting with English plays. “You have to deal with English characters unfamiliar to the kathakali audience. You have to translate English verse into kathakali padams without losing its beauty and poignancy,” says the artist who plans to take more stories and present them in kathakali format.
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