The Bard in Shards

There wasn’t a moment of silence at the performance of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare at the India Habitat Center on Tuesday evening. The audience guffawed at familiar speeches and roared with mirth while Sahil Chatterjee,24,Karam Vir Lamba,21 and Mihir Chattopadhyay,19,of Black Cow Company,performed 36 of Shakespeare’s plays in less than two hours,with great gusto,tacky costumes and remarkably portable props. “The Company had performed the play in 2007 and we’ve brought it back because it is a great play to stage,” says Misha Singh,24,who first watched the play in London a few years ago and bought the script and the rights of the play.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is a riot act with the Bard’s comedies made more hilarious,his tragedies enacted with insufficient pathos and adequate tomfoolery and his “geo-political” plays are stretched across the auditorium. Shakespeare’s boring plays were also highlighted: “I don’t think we should do Corialanus”,remarked Lamba to Chatterjee and Chattopadhyay. “I don’t particularly like the ‘anus’ part of it.” The winning scenes of the play however was the performance of Hamlet,as it was performed in-depth: with a mini and micro version of it,as well as a rewind version,in which the actors spoke the dialogues backward.