Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✩
by Kālidāsa, adapted and directed by Charles Roy
Pleiades Theatre, Fleck Dance Theatre, Toronto
February 5-15, 2009
The Canadian professional premiere of Shakuntala, the greatest play by Kālidāsa (c. 5th century AD), the greatest of Sanskrit authors, is reason enough for any true theatre-lover mark this down as a must-see. Pleiades Theatre has given it a simple but beautiful production integrating music, gesture and dance in such a way as to give the audience a suggestion of the interdisciplinary nature of Sanskrit drama.
Viewed from a European perspective, the play is much like Shakespeare’s late romances, a combination, say, of Pericles with The Winter’s Tale. While hunting, King Dushyanta (Sanjay Talwar) meets Shakuntala (Anita Majumdar), a young girl living at a country ashram and the two instantly fall in love. They marry without her foster father’s consent and the King returns to the palace saying he send for her soon. Unfortunately, the ill-tempered sage Durvasas (Frank Cox-O’Connell), unhappy with his welcome at the ashram, curses Shakuntala by causing the King to lose all memory of her. Both Dushyanta and Shakuntala undergo many physical and psychological trials before they are finally reunited.
Teresa Przybylski’s set of five moveable white vine-encircled pillars works well at suggesting the play’s numerous locations. Hari Krishnan’s choreography to Reza Jacob’s delightful music combines modern and traditional Indian dance. All dialogue is accompanied by elegant stylized hand gestures that beautifully make the verbal visual. While Talwar underplays some aspects of his role, he is most effective as the young King shaken by the first pangs of true love and later as the older King crushed with despair. Majumdar finely details Shakuntala’s painful growth from innocence to maturity. David Collins shows his enormous range by playing everything from gods and sages to humble charioteers.
Shakuntala, originally written in seven acts with a prologue, takes at least five hours to perform. Director and translator Charles Roy has adapted the work to a running time of three hours using a multiracial cast of only eight playing two dozen roles. I very much missed the surprisingly modern Prologue in the Theatre that Goethe later imitated in his Faust. The first half of the evening, comprising the original’s first fours acts, passed with languorous beauty. However, the second half, comprising the last three acts, is so crowded with incident and the intervention of unfamiliar deities that it is less easy to follow. Nevertheless, this production of Shakuntala is on many levels a profoundly enlightening experience.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-02-10.
Photo: Anita Majumdar, Sanjay Talwar and Carrie-Lynn Neals. ©Cylla von Tiedemann.
2009-02-10
Shakuntala