Rajat Kapoor puts yet another clown on stage with Nothing Like Lear, a one-man-act, broadly based on Shakespeare’s well-known tragedy. On February 28, Vinay Pathak played the Fool on the GD Birla Sabhagar stage and had the audience hooked to the bittersweet narrative of his life.

It begins on a light-hearted note. The lights in the auditorium are still on but when the Fool potters on stage with his leather attache case, the hum dies at once. “It hasn’t started yet,” he assures us and we laugh. We’re in the mood to laugh. The Fool wants to be left to his own devices but he’s put out when he finds all eyes on him. He wails at the technicians to begin the play because everyone is staring at him. And so it begins. At first, there’s a bit of gibberish — RK likes his clowns to be nonsensical. There’s more of this in Hamlet — The Clown Prince.

The title of this play is deliberately beguiling. The mad king is indeed present in the clown who feels the loss of his daughter and can cope with it only because he possesses all the characteristics of the Learing Fool — wit, honesty and perception. The difference lies in the fact that his astute observations on life are not necessarily an outsider’s perspective on another person but, in fact, a result of introspection.

Had Aristotle been present in the audience, he would have been pleased to have noted that tragic guidelines had not been disregarded and that the Fool moved us to both pity and fear before heroically leading us to a catharsis in the denouement.

Pathak plays an old man who no longer has the attention of his beloved daughter — an uncomfortable truth that perhaps many of us are familiar with. But then he pulls down his pants to reveal Batman boxers, and we laugh so we may ignore what is discomfiting.

Nothing Like Lear is a tragicomedy if there ever was one. It is the second in Kapoor’s Shakespeare series. He wants to do at least five plays. He’s toying with the idea of doing As You Like It and Macbeth next. Why Shakespeare, you wonder? “Shakespeare is one of those scary things. You feel uneducated if you don’t understand him. Perhaps this is my attempt to educate myself,” he explains, with a half-smile.

Kapoor thinks Bangalore is a heartening place for theatre. He’s disappointed with the theatre-goer in Calcutta. “Calcutta is not the cultural capital. There are never very many people in the audience. Social media and bookmyshow.com are enough for other cities. I don’t know how to reach people in Calcutta.”

Swastika Mukherjee
on the play
It is a performance to remember.
Vinay Pathak grips you in a way that you will find no escape. He never lets go, not for a minute and not for the entire span of the play. He is one and he is every one of the characters. The psychiatrist that kindles his fantasies, the daughter who abhors his intense, stifling love, the actor who forgets his lines, the narrator weaving a kaleidoscope of stories, the lost man, the great hero — they come in wave after wave as you sit mesmerised, only to be shaken back to reality by his intermittent jibes at the audience. If at any moment you let in the thought that the tempo might finally slow down, he hits you with another act that you never saw coming. A brutal murder, a maniac’s theatrics, a thundering performance that demands applause blend into the fabric of this play so naturally, as if it’s meant to be. All of this is encapsulated in music and shaded in light and yet remains very minimalist. It is a masterpiece by Rajat Kapoor put into surrealistic existence by the one-man company called Vinay Pathak.It is a performance to remember.

Vinay Pathak’s ability to improvise with such presence of mind and interact with the audience, without being distracted, was brilliant. I’m so glad I didn’t miss it
— Madhu Neotia

I was very emotional while watching the play. It stirred something in me. Vinay Pathak was phenomenal. He had us evaluating our own lives
— Radhika Singhi

Ramona Sen
When it comes to theatre, is Calcutta the cultural capital of India? Why/ why not?
Tell t2@abp.in