Macbeth by Swapnosandhani

Unforgotten tragedies are best remembered and enjoyed perhaps. Every individual wants to be poignant somewhere somehow. Happiness is boring and monotonous. It makes a man fearful and aimless because he has nothing more to achieve and that monotony of life makes an individual frustrated. He loses hope and cannot really think beyond as all his ambitions are gone with his completion of the circle of goals he ever dreamt of completing.

And beyond every completion of ambition, apart from individual will power, a catalytic force always works as an intense undercurrent that makes the self-esteem of the individual stronger. Even if the man rises to fall he does it with an unparalleled confidence and dignity that none can defy and it works in him like a force that is even more powerful than the sun is. And that cuts the honest hero out of him and the show of it worth countless tears.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth – a brace made for each other; they complete each other. With a full house audience to cry with this classical tragedy of William Shakespeare, where the tragic flaw of the hero was his ambition to be the most powerful man on throne imbedded into him through occult forces, the translated play by ‘Swapnosandhani’ was just perfect. Kaushik sen and his better half had been outstanding on stage as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. I have a feeling as an audience that Swapnosandhani always focuses on some surprising elements or gimmicks with its stand-alone stage sets that the quality of acting becomes the second priority and all the flaws are quite shrouded by the light-stage-set-and-action beyond the expectation of the audience. The never-seen before things attract the audience so much that they forget to empathize with Macbeth or Lady Macbeth. All they expect is how would the known facts be represented on stage…what is the novel technique adopted.

In making things new and more relevant through sense translation of the play, the character that faces the heaviest of the blows is the one of Lady Macbeth. She, as an actor is sometimes even far better than Macbeth. However, she loses her dignity when there are almost straight hints that it was through the sensuousness that she grinds into Macbeth the seed of ambition and to achieve that no matter what he needs to do.

Needless to say that things are thematically well driven and concluded though the denoument draws a little closer to  contemporary political outlook in West Bengal as it talks about whoever is on the throne, is to be feared and tyranny grips in him. This unexpected twist gets applaud from the audience.