Shakespeare’s fourth death centenary marks a milestone for Bengaluru-based theatre director S Surendranath. His first English play Shylock, based on The Merchant of Venice, was staged on May 5, 6 and 7.
Though the hour-long production featured only two characters—Antonio and Shylock—of the novel, “Actors Nakul Bhalla and Anish Victor played their parts brilliantly, and the play remained faithful to the original,” Surendranath says.
Suri, as the director is known in the theatre circles of Bengaluru, says, “I have only edited lines from The Merchant of Venice.” But he also admits to having drawn from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.
The play was staged at Ranga Shankara. The director confided that he had butterflies in his stomach before the show was presented, even though it was not his first attempt of experimenting with Shakespeare. He has directed two other plays earlier, Neenaanaadre Naaneenena (an adaptation of The Comedy of Errors) and Maari Kaadu, a version of Macbeth, written by Jnanpith awardee Chandrashekar Kambar.
Surendranath was inspired to work on Shylock after watching Guy Masterson’s ‘theatrical lecture’ of the same title, when it came to Ranga Shankara two years ago. While the English play deals with a universal theme (minority), he has Indianised Shakespeare in the two Kannada productions.
“In Shylock, the title character is not the villain like he is in original story,” the director says. Instead, the play is a subaltern take on the Jews. “The characters talk like Indians and live in today’s world,” he says. The director had a decade-and-a-half’s stint in television.
His other play, Neenaanaadre Naaneenena, is set in the old Bengaluru locality of Malleswaram, and Maari Kaadu has been written in a folklore style, a touch only Kambar’s expert pen can give.
“When it comes to Macbeth, I was deeply influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s film Throne of Blood. I was looking for a language, and hailing from Davangere, I wanted something folksy. So I requested Meshtru, as I call Kambar, to write it for me,” the director says.
Despite Kambar got offended initially as he didn’t want to write plays for anyone, “The writer worked on many versions before zeroing in on one. We first staged it in 2013,” Surendranath says.
Ask him when his fascination with the 17th century bard began, Surendranath jokes, “The only playwright who doesn’t get offended and whom you don’t have to pay royalty to”, and takes you through his journey in theatre.
“In Davangere, we used to read, not watch, plays. The first play we watched was Evam Indrajit, a production of B V Karanth brought to town in the early 70s,” he recalls. “I was completely blown, and I tried to do a couple of plays after that, which I botched up.”
Seeing the Badal Sircar play on stage was a turning point in the life of the director.
A year or two later, he met K V Subbanna, who has set up one of the Karnataka’s best known theatre institutes, Ninasam, in his village Heggodu in Shivamogga district. “Subbanna gave me books to read,” Surendranath says. “And I toured with the Ninasam (hobbyist) troupe for a couple of years. It was an eye-opener.”
In the years later, one thing led to another, and he found himself as a student of the country’s premier institute for theatre by the late 70s. “I always joke that Karanth and I joined NSD at the same time—he as director, and I as a student,” he says with a chuckle.
In his initial years in Bengaluru, where he moved soon after graduating, Surendranath did lighting for Shankar and Arundhati Nag’s troupe, Sanket. Then, he donned the director’s hat, which he has kept on through the decades, except during his hiatus between the late 90s and mid-2000s, when he was away in Hyderabad working for a television network.
Encouraged by Shylock’s reception, Surendranath credits his actors for picking up every cue and nuance. He is now working on a four-member cast production of Othello, ‘full of monologues’, again in English.
“That’s almost ready. But the kids who work with me at Ranga Shankara—there are about 25—want me to do a comedy,” he says. “So I might just take up A Midsummer Night’s Dream next and put Othello on hold for a couple of years.” He plans to set this Kannada adaptation in Bengaluru as well. “I want to contemporise this too. Though how I’ll manage that with the magic potion, I’ve no idea,” he says, laughing.