Curtain calls and catcalls on the Marathi rangmanch. By Sumedha Raikar-Mhatre.
Satyadev Dubey’s motive for directing the Marathi version of Girish Karnad’s English play Wedding Album is simple. “Girish is my friend,” Dubey said. “I want to make him happy by presenting a different edition of his script.” But his co-producer Girish Patke’s reason is simpler still. “I am not particularly impressed by a trite story of flawed family relationships with the focus on the younger daughter’s marriage,” Patke said. “But for me and the rest of the cast, the prospect of working with Dubeyji is enough.”
Amruta More’s translation of the play Sapadlelya Athawani, is compressed into a single long act, dispensing with Wedding Album’s video clips and a sub-plot. “I have told Girish [Karnad] to be prepared for perfect destruction,” Dubey said.
Karnad isn’t the only playwright with an English language script that has reached a Marathi audience in recent years. Ek Rikami Baazu was adapted from Louis Page’s Tissue, Neil Simon’s Sunshine Boys was translated into Appa ani Bappa and Dario Fo’s Waking Up was renamed Kukuchkoo in its Marathi avatar. An Actor Dies… but, Miro Gavran’s play, ended up as Khel Mandiyela, Manomilan was a Marathi version of Chekhov’s The Proposal and Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? hit the stage as Uttar Ratra.
While most theatre people contend that the appreciation of a play’s subject is the primary driving force for translation, the recent Marathi adaptations of English scripts have been fuelled by diverse impulses. Pune-based director Mohit Takalkar, who adapted Bradley Hayward’s Legitimate Hooey to Matra Ratra in Marathi and Duncan Wells’ The Girl Who Lived Under my Bed to Bed Ke Neeche Rehne Wali in Hindi, feels that translations offer new possibilities for theatre. “As the world is becoming smaller, new writings of the West have come closer to our experiences and perceptions,” he said. “A Mumbaikar, a Parisian or a New Yorker is therefore bound to enjoy Legitimate Hooey, which deals with a city-bred couple living in a world of insecurities and lovelessness.” He added that most people still find it hard to believe that Bed Ke Neeche… is based on a foreign script.
Vandana Khare, who translated, adapted and produced The Vagina Monologues into Yoneechya Maneechya Gujgoshti, says she developed a Marathi version of Eve Ensler’s seminal play because she felt it was the right time to recreate the monologues in Marathi. “The subject was universal, based on real stories of subjugation,” she said. “But it wouldn’t have worked that well in Mumbai ten years ago because the public debate on gender and sexuality had not matured in Maharashtra then.” Khare has particularly fond memories of the recent houseful performance of Yoneechya… in Pune. “I was unsure of audience approval in a relatively straitlaced city like Pune. But appreciation was wholehearted, irrespective of the fact that our cast did not have a single established actress.”
With Sapadlelya Athawani, Dubey is looking forward to experimenting with the script, digging deeper into the text to find new meaning to the lines in Marathi. “Wedding Album’s script merely states that the mother was hardly around when the daughter needed her most,” he said. “Here I could read the unstated: mothers do not necessarily prepare their daughters for menstruation. It catches young girls unawares, as is the case with the elder daughter in the play.” His version of the play focuses on instances like this, at which the female characters express their insecurities.
For other directors like Vijay Kenkre, who started his career with a Marathi version of Othello in 1985 and has adapted ten English scripts to Marathi since then, translation is more than just another way of relating to human experience. It’s a way of getting the most out of the playwright. Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is an example of how one text can fascinate different directors at different points. “I adapted it into a Marathi musical in 1990, it was reinterpreted from the gender perspective by Chetan Datar in 2002, and then hit the Marathi mainstream stage as Jadoo Teri Nazar in 2005,” Kenkre said. “That’s how adaptations bind theatre people.”
Sapadlelya Athawani will be performed at Yashwant Natya Mandir on Sun June 28.
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