HAMLET WITH CLOWNS
In Hamlet The Clown Prince, Rajat Kapoor presents us with an assured piece of theatre that combines comic farce with an ostensible element of tragedy through the performing of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a play within the play by a set of rambunctious clowns with joie de vivre to spare. The promotional literature advertises the play’s selling point as that it is delivered in something called ‘gibberish’ (and some say it’s Hebrew, and others Yiddish—all kinds of rumors abound). This is a misnomer. There is a natural flow of query and response understood and spoken by the denizens of this realm. They get each other, there is a constant back-and-forth and verbal scuffles that could teach almost anyone a thing or two about oneupmanship. The characters don’t spend any time trying to make sense of the proceedings. Neither do we, we dive straight in, the concocted phrases become second nature, nothing ever descends into meaninglessness. It’s all very clever, and words need to sometimes come garbled across in what appears to be an effortless spiel. Therefore gibberish is not quite the right epithet.
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