Clowning the Hamlet

Filmmaker, actor and theatre personality, Rajat Kapoor, will stage Hamlet: The Clown Prince, for the second time in Delhi on Monday at the Kamani Auditorium.

Filmmaker, actor and theatre personality, Rajat Kapoor, will stage Hamlet: The Clown Prince, for the second time in Delhi on Monday at the Kamani Auditorium.

According to the director’s note, “This play is a search in the world of Hamlet through the eyes of clowns. It is through the eyes of a clown that I want to explore the vast world of Hamlet. The result is a comic way in which the actors have improvised the various parts of the play and yet touched upon the tragedy of the young prince.”

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Staged in 2008 for the first time in Mumbai, the play has gathered good reviews on theatre blogs and has swept several awards, including best director and best actor, at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards.

The play centres on a bunch of clowns putting up a show of Hamlet. In order to do so they misinterpret the text, find new meanings in it, try and understand it and very often make a mess of it. The clowns use a fair bit of English and gibberish, as the play states, and through the search of the essence of Hamlet, they try to find a context in our own.