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Hamlet:The Clown Prince





When I heard that there was a going to be play on Hamlet in Chennai directed by Rajat Kapoor, I immediately warned my friends against it, stating that it would be super super boring to watch tragedy. It’s not that tragedies and serious plays are bad, but somehow I don’t seem to enjoy that so much. Anyways, coming back, one of my colleagues still went for the play and returned with raving praises for it. He said, it down right funny and hilarious and was something very good we missed. Funny, that’s right. I was equally surprised, as to how can a tragedy be depicted as funny? So next time this group came back to Chennai, we made sure that we didn’t miss it. And am extremely glad about it, as after 2 hrs of Hamlet, I found myself exhausted with all the laughing I did and had a smile on my face as I left the theatre. This definitely was one of the best plays that I had seen so far.
The play revolves around 6 clowns who are basically tired of doing comedy and therefore decide to enact tragedy. What comes to their mind is the king of all tragedies ‘Hamlet’. And from that point on, begins a roaring hilarious journey, where the clowns attempt to enact different scenes from Hamlet. As they proceed with the depiction of Hamlet, the play moves into their lives and the clowns keep forgeting that they are actually enacting Hamlet. Such shifts from Hamlet into the clown’s lives are frequent and with excellent comic timing, however the good thing about it is that these digressions from main story and back is done very clearly such that the audiences are not confused. The play has some high moments, specially the scene when one group of clowns lip sync the dialogues for a very serious and confrontational scene and somehow mess up the dialogues and the entire context of the scene is lost leaving you into splits. Also, the part when Hamlet’s dead father’s ghost is trying to communicate to Hamlet via dumb sharads that he wants Hamlet to take revenge of his death is up roaring.
The only thing I wish was that they didn’t use so much of gibberish and used more of plain English.But it’s a very tiny thing as against the creativity exhibited during the 2 hrs of play. It’s a brilliant piece of work by all the actors, director and story writer. I am not a person who understands literature, so as far as justice to Hamlet is concerned, I don’t know much, but feel that they haven’t mocked the great writer’s work in any offensive way. Else they wouldn’t have received a standing ovation for their performances. But purely from an entertainment perspective, I strongly recommend this specially to those who aren’t really fond of theatre and for those all theatre lovers, well, don’t miss this!
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