'HAMLET IN FARIDABAD'
New Delhi based theatre director and professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Saumya brought in a near academic discourse of the Performative and references of body actions from within the realm of Drama. His prior works shown were full-fledged theatre productions, often being renegotiation of prior texts or scripts. It also raised interesting queries about the dividing line between a solo act play and a live performance apart from its location and audience factors.
"Hamlet in Faridabad" lived remarkably up to the bold entitlement, which Saumyabratta created. Almost pendulum like in the enactment of its narrative ... the outcome had the sense of a very theatrical one-act play, as Saumya would toggle between multiple identities. The performance had a taped vocal narrative running interspersed with blank spaces so one ID would do acts connected to the "voice over" silently and suddenly would jump into the other ID which had a more ranting quality to the Performative delivery, carrying over elements of the previous ID ...in a very literal manner.... so often the elements of ID1 would act in a delayed fashion with newer elements superimposed over the previous ones. Both IDs had their locational sets as well with the ID2 placing itself on a rail track while the ID1 was more of a labour home accessory.
Hemant Sreekumar
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Soumyabrata Choudhury
Hamlet in Faridabad
“Poor boy with a book in hand …” so remarked a modern poet referring to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s famous creation. Struck by this image, I said to myself “what fabulous poverty! what an array of possible reading material to set Hamlet off on the inherited road to thought and action, what chilling, eerie lack of thought or action from book to book, newspaper to newspaper, library to library, city to city, nation to nation, inheritance to every conceivable inheritance !”
Strangely, the question I came upon next marked the threshold of a further possibility: How does one perform the radical refusal of thought and action, refusal of that hitherto conceived as the work of thought, or work produced or performed by action? Is it possible?
But of course, this very doubt was based on an inherited notion of performance – performance as work. A moral and economic notion geared to maintain certain fundamental unfreedoms … thus Hamlet’s great disquiet – how do I (Hamlet) perform what my filial and feudal duties urge me to do? how do I avenge my father’s murder and be true to my martial, royal, scholarly and administrative inheritance? Consequently the performance of Hamlet in Faridabad was thought out as a performance of disinheritance.
So then Faridabad … Or rather, a certain ‘library’ in the dusty, industrial town called Faridabad across Delhi’s border… or rather, a certain neighbourhood of birds, trees, cats on rooftop, bylanes and industrial workers who work, meet, talk, read, write, write of their lives, how life resists the inherited rhythm of so-called ‘productive ‘ work and its everyday alienated performance … a neighbourhood known to some as “mazdoor (workers’) library, Faridabad – 121001”. So what happens when Hamlet, searching for a sufficient reason (to be or not to be?) among words, words, words… on a pilgrimage of libraries, comes upon Mazdoor (workers’) library in Faridabad and its monthly newspaper /newsletter? Its gathering together of voices that refuse to speak ‘inherited’ words ?.
Hamlet in Faridabad was essentially based on this playful, and admittedly eccentric series of questions. It tried to interrogate the intervention of performance in life as its lived by people from different locations in society, often fractious and incompatible between themselves, yet compelled by common (often unconscious) physical and metaphysical axioms of existence. As far as it was an open critique of the functional obligation to perform, Hamlet in Faridabad was a didactic effort . It quoted to the audience what it thought would persuade (or should one say dissuade) the latter. But it retained a grave unintelligibility at its heart – how to perform the disinheritance of performance itself? how to move from performance as / of work to performance as / of freedom? - and asked the audience to share the difficulty of this real blindspot. And in so far as the audience thought back, spoke back and extended this discourse alongside the performance , Hamlet in Faridabad has reason to be immeasurably grateful to everyone who stopped and stood by it.