Bollywood's a stage for the Bard

Avijit Ghosh / TNN / Jul 23, 2006, 01:57 IST

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As you like it or not, the 16th century playwright's Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice have all been adapted for Bollywood audiences.

NEW DELHI: This ain't much ado about nothing. From Sohrab Modi's 17-song interpretation of Hamlet in Khoon Ka Khoon in 1935 to Vishal Bharadwaj's forthcoming Omkara, a gritty take on Othello set in the cruel killing fields of rural Uttar Pradesh — Hindi films and William Shakespeare have had a long tempestuous relationship. As you like it or not, the 16th century playwright's Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Comedy of Errors have all been adapted for Bollywood audiences. Most of them were love's labour lost. "Hamlet was Kishore Sahu's dream project. But it was a big flop," recalls Mala Sinha, then the film's 18-year-old Ophelia. So was Romeo Juliet, directed by actress Nargis' brother, Akhtar Hussein. Even Do Dooni Chaar, based on Comedy of Errors, flopped. Others like Vishal Bharadwaj's Maqbool, based on Macbeth, at least earned critical acclaim. Gulzar, who wrote screenplay and dialogues for Do Dooni Chaar, reminisces producer Bimal Roy was down with cancer during the shooting. Supervision was outsourced to United Producers. "Consequently, the film lacked spontaneity," he recalls. Over a decade later when he told producer Yash Johar about his desire to make another film on the same story, Gulzar received an interesting answer. "People want to remake superhits. Why remake a flop?" But the director-poet persisted with the idea and Angoor was made. Even today the superhit is in demand on the VCD circuit. "I also wanted to do a film on Julius Caesar once," reveals Gulzar. There are reports that Anant Mahadevan too wants to film another version of Comedy of Errors.Apart from these Shakespeare adaptations, several other films have been partly inspired by the bard's works. Film historian Firoze Rangoonwalla recalls that Dilfarosh, a 1930s film, was based on The Merchant of Venice. He also points out, "Shades of The Tempest can be seen in the 1930s costume drama Aab-e-Hayat. And it is easy to see that parts of Aan (Dilip Kumar Nadira), Ziddi (Asha Parekh, Joy Mukherjee), Dharamveer (Dharmendra, Zeenat Aman), Betaab (Sunny, Amrita Singh) are inspired by Taming of the Shrew."Ashish Rajadhyaksha in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema credits Sohrab Modi with bringing "Shakespeare to the Indian screen." A Times of India review published on January 10, 1936 said that Modi's performance in the Hamlet-based Khoon Ka Khoon dominated the film to the extent that "other characters did not matter much."Rangoonwalla adds, "Modi told once me the film was shot with two cameras when the play was being staged. It was edited later. It was the first time an experiment like this was done." Experiments continue. For Maqbool Bharadwaj translocated the setting to Mumbai underworld. Now, he does the same to Omkara set in rural UP, a nautch girl and all.

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