Jan. 29: Soumitra Chatterjee wants to play King Lear again. The thespian expressed this wish on the Kalam stage on Friday, in the presence of Suman Mukhopadhyay, who had directed him for the Minerva Repertory Theatre production that had Chatterjee straddling the stage like a colossus as Shakespeare’s angry old king till the curtains were forced on it. 

“When I was young, I wanted to play Hamlet. I even translated it. No other play brings the agony of the age so vividly alive. My desire to do Macbeth is still there but I doubt if my health will permit it. But Lear I want to do again,” he said, to audience applause, in response to a question from moderator Aparajita Dasgupta. 

If Raja Lear was Chatterjee’s maiden tryst with Shakespeare, so it was for Mukhopadhyay whose earlier production Coriolanus had followed Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation Coriolan rather than the original. For Raja Lear, he admitted to following Grigori Kozintsev’s film for editing the five-hour play down to three. Both spoke of the immense work that went into finalising the script with Chatterjee himself lending a hand. “We had to keep the classicism but we made sure the Bengali did not sound archaic,” Mukhopadhyay said.

The director recalled how Chatterjee lived as Lear in those days. “He would paint, compose poetry, write his own dialogues.... Even when he forgot lines on stage, he would never falter. Such is his grasp of Bengali that he could carry on without the audience making out.” 

“Shakespeare’s genius can be felt best on stage and fresh interpretations, be they good or bad, keep him alive,” Mukhopadhyay said, while analysing international adaptations such as Fritz Bennewitz’s Tempest where Caliban is handsome and the others have physical defects and Peter Brooks’ Hamlet in which Naseeruddin Shah was part of the cast of seven.