‘Even the Taliban have watched our plays’

MUMBAI: In August 2011, the Taliban attacked the British Council in Kabul. A suicide bomber detonated a vehicle and gunmen engaged security forces in a six-hour siege. Twelve people were killed, scores more traumatised. And a group of Afghan theatre actors lost a place to rehearse.
The group, Rah-e-Sabz, had been gearing up for a Dari production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.“We were supposed to rehearse that day,” says Corinne Jaber, the play’s director in a phone interview. “I had asked the actors to come after their morning prayer. They wanted to come later in the day. Had they agreed, they would probably not be here now.”
The troupe changed its rehearsal space to a rather unusual venue—Nrityagram, the dance gurukul near Bangalore. The cast and crew have been rehearsing here since April and will soon participate in Globe To Globe, a festival of Shakespearean plays from across the world that is currently under way at the Globe Theatre in London. Before leaving for UK, the group will perform in Rangashankara in Bangalore and Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai.
Jaber chose to relocate to India in order to rehearse peacefully. “In Afghanistan, you’re always on edge,” she says. “It’s not a condition you’d like for your actors.” An actor and director, this German-Canadian played Amba and Shikhandi in Peter Brook’s 1989 film version of the Mahabharata. She first visited Kabul in 2005 and during her stay directed Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour Lost. “The Afghans wanted a comedy,” she says tellingly. “They don’t want tragedy.”
Jaber found Shakespeare apt for Afghan audiences as “Elizabethan England and contemporary Afghanistan resemble each other much more than Elizabethan England and Europe today”.
“A lot of customs and ways of being correspond,” she says. She has situated The Comedy of Errors in war-torn Kabul—in this adaptation, an expatriate Afghan returns to Kabul after a war to search for his twin sons who were separated in the desert during a sandstorm. “Someone looking for lost family members is very Afghan,” Jaber says.
All the cast members, even the women, are professional actors. Being in the television or film industry is particularly hard for women in a conservative society that’s perennially on edge because of the threat of physical danger posed by the Taliban. “Some of the women actors in the play entered the entertainment business because they needed money,” says Jaber.
Despite the peace of Nrityagram, Jaber says, her female actors are yet to loosen up. One of the challenges has been to get them to utter obscenities. While this might not have been permissible in Afghanistan—Jaber says she was compelled to direct a bowdlerised version of Love’s Labour Lost—it would be acceptable before foreign audiences. “Twice in the play, a character says: ‘You son of a hoar’,” Jaber says. “They said, ‘We can’t say that. It’s a bad word.’ They are confronted with huge freedom here, and they don’t know how to deal with it.”
The actors consider The Comedy of Errors a means of reviving interest in theatre in Afghanistan and, in the process, recovering from the trauma that began in 1979 with the proxy war fought between the Soviet Union and the US and continued with the battle against Islamic fundamentalists that started in 2001. Mamnoon Maqsoody, the actor who plays the father in The Comedy of Errors, teaches acting in Kabul University and is a production manager at a radio station. The 46-year-old has performed at the famous Kabul National Theatre that was destroyed during the war in the 1990s and never rebuilt. “We had a culture of going to the theatre and making theatre before the war,” Maqsoody says in a phone interview. “We had a theatre called the Kabul National Theatre. Technically speaking, I haven’t seen such a fantastic theatre even in Bangalore.” Maqsoody believes that theatre has the power to persuade even the Taliban to forsake violence. “I have been in so many plays in Helmand, Heart and Kandahar, where many members of the Taliban watched our plays,” he says. “We’ve talked and they have treated me well. We need people to speak to them and bring peace.”
Shakoor Shamshad, who plays one of the twins, was a student of Maqsoody in Kabul. The 33-year-old television actor has been living in London for ten years. He says he visits Kabul occasionally to act in Afghan films. “For me it is safer to live in London,” he says. “But you have to be brave to do something to bring about a revolution.”
(The Comedy Of Errors will be performed in Dari with English subtitles at Prithvi Theatre on May 19 at 6 pm & 9 pm)