Saumyabratta Chaudhary

'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.