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A love triangle, a pair of polar-opposite fathers, a knight more erring than errant, supernatural intrigue, choreographed romance, choreographed revenge, a feisty cockroach-monster, and a happy ending sung to the tune of La Bamba. Throw in a play-within-a-play, place 400 years of theatre against a popular entertainment industry a little over half-a-century old, and you get, in a nutshell, the Jadavpur University, Department of English production of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, directed by Ananda Lal. Mind-boggling, no doubt, but though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.
Much has been made of the enduring relevance of Shakespeare’s plays, but a revival of theatrical interest in the Renaissance today takes into consideration the fact that Shakespeare was hardly the only dramatic poet and genius of his time. Beaumont, Shakespeare’s contemporary, has received late recognition for the universal comedy of KBP.
JUDE’s creative rendition of KBP takes Beaumont’s original intention of satirizing the popular culture of his time and uses it to poke unabashed fun at the popular culture of our time. So we have, among other fantastic elements, a hero possessed with the flamboyance, the unreal heroism of all our leading men, who acts and dresses like Salman Khan (played by Inam Hussain Mullick, who makes serious business of comedy), a heroine whose playful innocence and seductive wiles echo that of romance heroines down the ages, her overbearing father who opposes the match with the high melodrama of the Indian TV serial (Arnab Banerji is hilarious in his spoof of the K-serial dialogue with echo-effect), and a grocer who plays the eponymous knight who can fight like a WWF wrestler and jive like Elvis with equal competence.
Every character in the original is reworked to parody mainstream global cultural stereotypes. The music covers all popular genres — from Hindi film songs to acid rock, right down to Bangladeshi rock.
Sudipto Sanyal as the knight is a show-stealer. Prakriti Dutta Mukherjee pulls off with élan the difficult task of portraying the stereotype of the dreamgirl-cum-distressed-damsel. Vinayak Das Gupta and Lav Kanoi excel in their bit parts. The brilliant costumes and artfully-designed set balance out the bad acoustics and some of the actors’ fumbling transition from dialogue to song.
Over-the-top, revelling in the complete outrageousness of its execution, KBP is a delicious comedy, a lampoon, a “farcical musical”, a “musical farce”. Call it what you will, but it’s still a lot of fun.