One of the new plays to hit town is Amirah (produced by Shohan), written by Anirban Sen and directed by Anish Ghosh. Sen takes major plot points from Sophocles’ Antigone and transposes them on to an Indian context to come up with Amirah. Therefore, in Amirah, the Greek royal family becomes a Muslim family — not royalty, but extremely affluent through business. As in Antigone, so in Amirah — a sister, central to the textual matrix, is on a dogged quest to give a dead brother a proper burial. Other characters that appear in Amirah are also mapped in direct correspondence to those from Antigone.
All this seems fine at the level of concept but as the play begins to roll, the biggest problem with Sen’s adaptive strategy raises its ugly head and stays put. The problem is that the replacement of the royal family with one that is not subtracts from Amirah the major thematic thrusts of the Sophoclean classic — the conflicts between divine rules and statist dicta, between citizenship duties and familial obligations. Deprived of these thematic mainstays, Amirah coils within itself to become localised, cut off from broad universal issues.
If the text has its set of problems, Ghosh’s dramatisation gives rise to a host of issues of its own, chief among which is the general proclivity towards lurid, overdone melodrama. It is almost as if the play attempts to compensate for the textual deflation by attempting a performative inflation which, sadly, does not work. A prime example of the attempt to blow things up without achieving much through it would be Kajal Shambhu’s hyper-performance, all aspects of which, from make-up and gestures to speech, get amplified to the extent of distortion.
The Amirah/Haroun scene — poetry-laden, soft and unreal — is the only standout moment in the play. The seemingly good idea of having two (choric) vultures manage scene transitions backfired, with the flailing and flapping about turning out to be grotesquely comical.
