As I sat in the darkened Mandala Theater last Friday evening, and Jimmy Porter, Cliff Lewis and Alison Porter slowly came to life, lines from Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Dangling Conversation’* came to mind. Except that the play that was unfolding was written exactly a decade earlier and in post-war England and claimed iconic status soon after its first production, clinching for itself the rare laurel of having started a movement of sorts, that of the ‘angry young men.’ John Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’ (1956) apparently pushed the English stage from its affected comedies to the ‘real’ world and was a fitting rejoinder to the gritty new American plays of the time, especially those of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.
One wonders what possible relevance ‘Look Back in Anger’ might have for present day Nepal. We have Jimmy Porter, whose working class background but elitist education makes him a cocktail bomb about to go off any second, except it doesn’t really. Osborne himself outlines Porter in his text as, “to be as vehement as he is, is to be almost non-committal.”
Divya Dev ignites the stage as Porter, raging against the futility of existence, against the social structures that embodied Britain, and mostly against the women in his life. It is difficult not to remember Hamlet as you watch him lash out at the external world while dissecting the inner. The play is so obviously located in 1950’s Britain with its socio-political and cultural references that at moments it is easy to forget its relevance to Nepal – except that when you look at the bigger picture. For this Hamlet is no prince but an over-educated working class kid trying to make sense of a society that refuses to respond to his emphatic desire for actual engagement with the times. His upper class tastes, including in women, can win him only a temporary reprieve from the real world’s lack of opportunities for him.
Watching him come to life where we have a blockade against daily essentials, when making it to that theater itself is a luxury few can afford because of the deadly fuel shortage and is therefore, also an act of solidarity in a way, one begins to appreciate the logic behind Director Shankar Rijal’s choice of production. As Jimmy Porter rants against the class system and the futility of even trying to overcome it, we cannot but be reminded of a Nepal where the youth daily face economic disenfranchisement and are driven to take flight or be depressed or get into addictions.
Sulakshan Bharati’s Cliff Lewis is a wonderfully good-natured and unaffected foil to the Porters’ over-wrought lives, in which post-war Britain seemed to be working out its class struggle and gender issues within the span of an hour and half. Bharati’s easy rendition of a lovable and loving friend, who glued together a marriage broken long ago, provided the play’s only probable moments of solace. His diction might call for improvement, but his gestural skills and theatrical fluency overrun that lack with ease.
Then we come to Alison Porter played by Akanchha Karki. Osborne himself describes Jimmy’s wife as: “Hers is the most elusive personality to catch in the uneasy polyphony of these three people. She is turned in a different key, a key of well-bred malaise that is often drowned in the robust orchestration of the other two.” From the moment Akanchha Karki looks up and absently says ‘What’s that?’, we are held in her thrall. She brings to life the only weapon that the less empowered and therefore habitually traumatized individuals (especially women) in any society wield, which is a stoic resistance to verbalizing or emoting the suffering and trauma they undergo on a daily basis. Alison embodies the trauma through every gesture of her tired hands and her child-laden, heavy flesh, and her even more tired, routine responses to Jimmy’s antics. Never quite letting go of the affected upper class accent that she is supposed to have inherited by birth, Alison is brilliantly played as the hostage that Jimmy had stolen for himself as a trophy from a class he relentlessly aspired to. Karki should lose the nose stud. Beyond that one can possibly not have anything to say against her performance that was less so and more a bringing to life of an entire section of society’s daily lived experience.
Helena Charles, played by Gunjan Dixit, is apt in her vehement moral and intellectual integrity. Scintillating as the other woman, as an exciting antipode to Alison’s worn fragility, Dixit is firm in her interpretation but may benefit from a more layered treatment of the character she plays. Colonel Redfern requires more stage presence, up as he is against a remarkable caste of emphatic performers. His staid, Edwardian father pales somewhat against the sizzling energies of the other four.
It will be comical if we are to start analysing an iconic, internationally acclaimed play for its own merit. However, it is indeed heartening to see that Osborne’s rather cultish text come alive on Nepali stage with a contemporary vehemence that far outstrips the original’s intended outburst against the ideological hegemony of the British gentry. The set and lights were adequately engaging and Director Rijal has definitely come through with a production that is charged with future promise.
I end with an unlikely quote, from Divya Dev’s recent Facebook post in which he states, and which will hopefully convey the play’s spirit of relevance in a nutshell: ‘It has been a routine for more than a month to walk back home for nearly an hour and a half almost every day in the late evenings after the rehearsals…I know I deserve at least a bus to go back home in after work. Well, there’s so much more. There’s so much more to rage about. There’s so much ANGER…And I happen to be doing the play that is so relevant to the circumstances I’m living with today. Hope you will feel the same.’
‘Look Back in Anger’ will be staged till December 6 at Mandala Theater, Anamnagar.
*Yes, we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
“Can analysis be worthwhile?”
“Is the theater really dead?”
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You’re a stranger now unto me
Lost in the dangling conversation.
And the superficial sighs,
In the borders of our lives.
Kurchi Das Gupta
The author is an Indian artist/writer/actor based in Kathmandu
Republica Daily
November 2015
Garden Theatre, Nepal 