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Clowning King Lear King Lear

Atul Kumar has donned a lot of hats, but this time around he’ll be clowning through a masterpiece by the the bard himself.

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Trust Rajat Kapoor to come up with an idea to clown a Shakespeare classic and Atul Kumar, usually the director, to be the perfect actor. After Hrs catches up with the talented performer, before his weekend performance, of Nothing Like Lear, in the city for a quick tête-à-tête. Excerpts from the interview...

King Lear is a tragedy, how did you manage to combine the pathos of the play with a sense of comedy?
If you look at the old comedies that you might have read or seen, they have a very strong aspect of tragedy and vice-versa. I don’t think there’s any comedy that doesn’t stem out of a tragedy. If you look at any tragedy by Shakespeare, or even the Greek tragedies, they stem out of comedy. When Charlie Chaplin slips on a banana peel, it makes the whole world laugh, but there is a tragic aspect involved in that. So, it was not very difficult at all because it’s inherent, it’s there... essentially lying and one just needs to extract and then play with it and make a play out of it.

What got you personally interested in adapting King Lear?
Rajat Kapoor, who is a fantastic director for yet another season, said that he wanted to do it as a clown, which was very exciting to explore the tragedy of King Lear as a clown. This is actually the third play in our clown trilogy and I’ve been a part of all his other plays. It was quite evident that I was going to do it with him.

How did the rehearsals come along?
Great! Fantastic, they’re like my family — Vinay and Rajat. Rajat, I’ve known for the last 25 years. We rehearse in his house, we drink 10 cups of coffee over each rehearsal, we joke, we have fun and in the process try and discover King Lear as well. It’s more like friends coming together and having fun. And of course Shakespeare does direct a bit. It’s great fun.

Was it difficult to only have yourself to play off of, as a solo actor?
It was difficult; I’ve never done a solo before so that was one of the challenges. There were no fellow actors on stage at any time to support you, to feed back on. That was tough but it was great fun at the same time. The audience’s attention is just on you throughout the play… so one has the freedom to change, adapt.

You’ve toured in several other countries; what makes an Indian audience different?
There are sometimes very culturally specific things that we do and say in our script, which are, of course, understood only by the Indian audiences, and sometimes maybe by the diaspora of the countries which we have performed in and not so much the foreign audiences, you know, the local audiences from those countries.

By and large, we try and keep our form and content as less specific to India as possible, make it more general and human as an experience so that it’s valid and it works in all countries and all cultures. And yet, it surprises us because a play that would have worked brilliantly in Jakarta for example would be a complete flop in China because the audience just wouldn’t react.

And a play that would work brilliantly on a tour in the US or UK would just fall flat in the Netherlands. These are the things that we have actually experienced.

Finally, where do TV commercials fit into all of this?
It keeps my house running. It helps buy some gifts for my daughter, nothing else.

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