Oh, a Rhinoceros….what’s the time Mrs. Woolfe?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Ionesco’s Rhinoceros

 

 

Time to join the dots and figure out why I’m thinking about Ionesco this morning. Perhaps because of a dark Bangalore afternoon in 1981. Gnatak is rehearsing Anton Chekov’s Three Sisters at Sophia High School and Ashok Mandana, recently returned from the Webber Douglas Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, is directing. I’m hesitantly playing Natalya and learning new things every day. (Recalling the names of the characters - Olga, Masha, Irina, the plummy Tuzenbakh – is enough to bring back those discoveries.) That cigarettes (this is the 80’s) spell maximum cool, that one could sneak a quarter of rum up to the terrace of Imperial Hotel after rehearsal, that life as articulated by Gundu Rao in his capitation fee zamaana is ultimately absurd and that Rhinoceros is a play by a French-Romanian playwright called Eugene Ionesco.

 

Back to 2007, Scotty. Watching the daily craziness of our socio-political times unfold I find myself thinking, “Walk right in, Rhinoceros. You’re just what the doctor ordered.” Or else, “Whatever became of Berenger?”

 

Theatre of the Absurd. That most marvelous and patently un-absurd of movements. Especially if one considers the absurdity of the varieties of violence we inflict on each other in real life! Remember Sisyphus ceaselessly rolling his rock up the hill? It would inevitably roll down; yet Sisyphus would repeat his action over and over again. That’s us. Girish Kasarvalli’s Tabara, based on Poorna Chandra Tejeswi’s Tabarana Kathe, is our Sisyphus.

 

The term, Theatre of the Absurd, was derived by the Hungarian drama theorist Martin Esslin from Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus writes “Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture.” Sisyphus recognizes the absurdity of it all, yet goes forward. Like Estragon in Waiting for Godot, struggling to get his boot off. Or as T.S.Elliot has Krishna say to Arjuna on the field of battle “Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers.” Thus Esslin used the term for a group of playwrights who were writing in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett and Ionesco being the most prominent.

 

Their work was deeply rooted in a mid 20^th century European context. The war was over. The 30’s saw the publication of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre and It’s Double and it’s summoning of collective myths, Camus and Franz Kafka were ritually dismembering utilitarianism, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi was a phenomenon, Freud and Strindberg had taken art into the realm of dreams and artists were seated on the shoulders of the Surrealists. Suddenly what society would have one believe – that everything could be solved by logic and rationality was being disputed by a counter-culture bent on evoking an apparent chaos and a feminine diffuse imaginary.

 

This counter-culture actively sought, or at least refused to whitewash, the underbelly of the beast. As Artaud says “…the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war or insurrection.”

 

So when Genet wrote The Maids, his muse was the gutter not the salon. And the pleasure lies therein. Similarly, Ionesco’s plays make a scandal of all that is “normal and respectable”. Depicting characters that are polite, civilized, yet utterly banal, he uses catalysts (such as the rhinoceros) to cause them to unravel and expose the falseness, herd instinct, savagery and despair present behind the facade.

 

While Rhinoceros and The Bald Soprano are his best known plays, and a production of Chairs played here recently, I have never seen Ionesco’s lesser known Exit the King. So I am really curious about what became of Berenger. In Rhinoceros, he’s just a guy who lives in a nondescript French town into which enters a rhinoceros. In Exit the King, he is now King of a Rapidly Deteriorating Kingdom. Who are the others in Berenger’s kingdom? What are the busy with? Or, are they busy at all? I want to know how Ionesco ended Berenger’s quest.

 

I am also particularly intrigued by an aspect of Absurd Theatre that has to do with evoking the mythic and transcendent. Vladimir and Estragon await Godot. Godot is a myth. Solange in The Maids kills her sister Claire in an attempt to sublimate their lives and transcend the garret they live in. In Exit the King, Berenger says “I see myself in everything. Nothing but me everywhere. Am I in every mirror? Or am I the mirror of everything” How strange and wonderful. It’s for us to realize.

Tat Tvam Asi.

 

I want to feel the power of that thought on stage.

 

And now, Berenger’s in town. Anmol Vellani is directing a new production of Exit the King that opens at Ranga Shankara on April 10^th. My friend Sanjay Iyer plays Berenger.

 

- Kirtana Kumar

 

Deccan Herald, Sunday Herald April 8th ‘07