A recent performance at Kitab Mahal of Shivani Tibrewala’s dramatic adaptation of Italo Calvino’s select stories from his volumne of ‘Numbers in the Dark and other Stories’ felt like a lumbering ride, which thankfully didn’t last long. A few crucial things appeared to have terribly gone wrong. For one, the staged adaptation failed to convey the underlying ethos of the select stories, the only exception perhaps being one of the ‘impossible interviews’, Neanderthal Man.
Considered to be one amongst the well-known literary figures of the twentieth century, Italo Calvino’s writing has been compared to that of Franz Kafka’s and Gabriel Gracias Marquez’s. According to Joe Cadora’s review of the volumne: “For the reader unfamiliar with Italo Calvino, Numbers in the Dark offers an almost painless entree into the full range of his work, comprising as it does thirty-seven stories, fables, and fantastic interviews which range his career from beginning to end.”
Calvino achieved fame as an imaginative fabulist whose writing hovers between allegory and fantasy. The politics of power and the absurdity of the human condition were some of the themes that interested him. These themes are constantly bubbling under the surface in stories like ‘The Man Who shouted Teresa’ which was also one of the select pieces in the staged version.
The short story is more like a situational vignette whose surface simplicity can be as complex as the reader wishes it to be. The absurd comedy of the situation can for instance be seen as a satire on mob mentality and yet again is capable of offering other subtle insights. Sadly the staged story offered next to nothing and its different ending (call it Miss Tibrewala’s interpretation which resulted in her taking the dramatic license) merely came across as a pathetic ploy to create laughter.
This was more or less the case with the other select stories. Neither ‘Making Do’, ‘Solidarity’ or ‘Conscience’ (which one didn’t even know when it started or ended as the actors forgot to change the placard) offered food for thought. Apparently these stories are Calvino’s take on a post-war Italy, ridden by the Fascist regime. So although the play’s program mentioned the same, there was little to suggest any such context or reference in the presentation itself.
The lack of a suitable context was further heightened by unimaginative blocking and the failure to work in a performance space that called for a degree of ingenuity. The only reason why ‘Neanderthal Man’ had something to give was because it lasted much longer than the others. But once again there was no significant intellectual stimulation coming from this fabled interview, which in a sense lampoons ideological supremacy.
As such the production came across as an amateurish attempt. Even Shamath Majumdar whom I have known to give decent performances earlier could not salvage the show. While it is heartening to have young theatre people experiment with literary texts and ideas, I believe it is equally important for them to train. And by training I don’t mean a one-off workshop or even necessarily a fixed study course. A sustained self-learning program which includes some fundamentals such as seeing different kinds of plays (the language not being a barrier) and gaining hands-on experience in productions directed by more experienced people would definitely help.
(The writer is Editor of this site, a theatre critic and an academic keenly interested in theatre and performance studies)
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