A blue-hued ambience, redolent with the sweet, alluring smell of burnt camphor leads you into the significantly opposite but strangely complementary worlds of God and courtesan in Girish Karnad’s recent play, FLOWERS. Like his early plays such as HAYVADANA and NAGMANDALA, this one too is based on a folk tale. The tale in question is from Chitradurga in Karnataka and revolves around a Brahmin priest and his equal love for the God Shiva and for his mistress, the wealthy and beautiful courtesan, Chandravati.
While Karnad casts his creative net to make the tale his own, the experience is quite unlike his earlier reworking of folk tales. For one, the play takes the form of a long monologue. This is of course not a problem in itself but the performance, enacted by Rajit Kapoor and directed by Roysten Abel is rather static and devoid of any external drama. Again Karnad’s script is somehow not as compelling as his earlier work. For instance it doesn’t possess the wry humour or the eternal dilemma of say a HAYVADANA.
Undoubtedly it is steeped in symbolism and allusions, but for the greater part it remains a personal account. In spite of it being a pointed reference to the conservatism and the one-track mind in which the holy and the sexual cannot cohabit, it falls short of provoking a more nuanced response. Our sympathy is partly aroused but that is more or less all. The irony however in instances such as when the protagonist-priest says something to the effect of ‘Cannot God be a woman?’ is quite telling.
The priest’s passionate worship of the non-living ‘lingam’ and the living ‘yoni’ underlies the oneness of the Shiv-Shakti principle but in this case it unearths the superficial but deeply entrenched modes of thought. How can the sacrilegious (the priest’s relationship with the courtesan) be beautiful and divine? In a sense then, the play becomes a subdued critique of the paradoxes that we comfortably create and appear to live by for the sake of received and accepted convention.
Roysten Abel’s direction lends the production a transcendental quality with the combined effect of light and water. At the same time the convergence of three or four spotlights appears too orchestrated as in a music concert. Rajit Kapoor’s priest is situated at a height, much above the stage level and below him is the temple tank. It is here, perched on a ledge that he reflects his life in the shimmering waters below.
His character takes on a slow, measured speech but beyond a point it becomes altogether monotonous. Except in bits and parts, it is virtually impossible to imagine the characters and the events in his life. Kapoor does well for the narrative style he adopts but it fails to create any lasting resonance. And that is a pity because the text is rich with a descriptive quality that is found in novels. It would perhaps be worthwhile to see a different kind of production of the play or at least a more engaging reading that doesn’t feel so distant.
*The writer is Editor of this site, a theatre critic and an academic keenly interested in Theatre and Performance Studies.
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