Rajat Kapoor’s Nothing Like Lear Reimagines King Lear as clown theatre

'My way of life is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf', says Macbeth is Act V Scene 3.

Be it the page or the stage, Shakespeare’s protagonists have always devised their trajectories through the narratives. The fidgeting youth in Hamlet evolves into an obsessed lover in Othello and a tyrannical King in Macbeth. The culmination perhaps is marked in the octogenarian King in King Lear, as Edgar proclaims in the play: 'Ripeness is all. (Act 5 Scene 2)'. Vinay Pathak’s mono - act Nothing Like Lear uses the age trope as a bait to lure the audience to their personal sojourn of intimate emotions. Pathak’s Lear, directed and conceptualised by Rajat Kapoor, attempts a minimalist portrayal that adapts the subtext of the Shakespearean tragedy to adeptly suit it to the contemporary and the timeless: the father – daughter relationship. Much like Shakespeare’s tragedies, the political becomes the personal in this production, so much so that the political context ceases to exist.

First staged in 2012 and successfully touring around theatres across India for the last fourteen years, this mono – act is not the first by Rajar Kapoor that makes a clown – based adaptation. This follows the tradition of plays like C for Clowns and Hamlet: The Clown prince. While a major chunk of the audience would call it a triumph of contemporary theatre where the gibberish as a form is used to turn the tragic elitism of Shakespeare into a commonplace theme; an audience well – versed in Shakespeare might question the use of Shakespeare as a branding to allure the audience only to beguile them into watching a performance that could have been a standalone production as well.

Vinay Pathak’s extra – ordinary finesse as an actor is laudable and his attempts to manoeuvre the audience and trigger synaesthetic consciousness is arguably hypnotic at the outset; but as you try participating in the journey with him, you keep feeling ostracised from Shakespeare or Lear, you are lost in the quagmire of being compelled to helplessly laugh and cry, appreciate or detest the gameplay the actor chooses for you. By the time, the textual references jostle to make themselves pertinent, the audience is perhaps more deracinated than the deracinated clown in deep melancholy of being a dejected father! The lines of the text King Lear appear mostly out of context within the performance, almost sounding like a jargon used for people – pleasing just because the name 'Lear' has been used in the title.

The title of the play Nothing Like Lear aptly defends the stance taken by the director – actor duo and the audience in the hall is rivetted between watching a play and watching a Shakespearean play on stage. While the play subverts every possible expectation and connotation attached to the primary text, the undercurrent creates a devastatingly relatable context one would associate with and dissociate from simultaneously throughout the running time which is approximately one hour and forty minutes. The minimal use of props and the unaccentuated make – up and costume of the clown holds a mirror to one’s tomfoolery where you enter a parley with the actor on stage who urges you to think in Blakean terms:

"Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?"

The audience through this parley engages and then feels self – aware, illumines and recoils like a snail as the actor uses his scathing humour to mutilate or offend in the garb of breaking the fourth wall. The latent super – ego of the performance camouflages any traces of novelty in adapting a Shakespearean play which disavows the intellectual and moral propriety of the audience in lieu of estrangement effect. The archetype of the clown is used to its best effect leaving the audience completely off – guard, laughing hysterically at times and dropping to benumbing silence the very next moment.

The cheeky disclaimer in the title of the play rightfully usurps the layers and political subtexts in the Shakespearean play only to reduce it into an overtly mock – cathartic expedition that sheepishly claims to bear resemblance with only those scenes in the play that pops up in the mind of readers who know Shakespeare through Wikipedia or Chatgpt! As Vinay Pathak seamlessly alternates between the clown who feels out of place and the father who is out in the storm called life, the audience saunters through crude and vegetative slapstick comedy, transitioning to raw and macabre violence and pretentiously exuding vulnerability that almost pops up like a notification toggle on your handset, only to disappear until you rummage through the gibberish and identify the subtext.

The rambling of the ambling clown could have been a wonderful original experimental street play, had it not weaponised the Shakespearean text, only to use popular sub-plots like Edmund’s bastardy or Gloucester’s blinding without their context or textual significance. The play Nothing like Lear remains a heterogenous mixture of commonplace slapstick comedy intercepted by occasional and misfitted grandiloquence that exploits, rather than exploring a Shakespearean text for fetching audience to the auditorium!