Hearts of stone

Nothing Like Lear begins with the Clown chit-chatting with the audience, telling them the play hasn't started yet, asking them to relax and send that last text. It's a brilliant narrative device, lulling the audience into a sense of familiarity. The jokes fly thick and fast—the audience is asked to chip in as the Clown proceeds to gain their confidence; at one point he raises a bro-fist at a male audience member and says, 'Brother, I understand.' The entire auditorium erupts in laughter. It's a conversation between friends. They understand each other. And so the Clown proceeds to confess his story—the unhelpful therapist, the over-achieving bastard brother, the lost daughter, the odd taskmaster that is the father. It's all very intimate.

Vinay Pathak uses his Bollywood star persona—and his audience's expectations of it—to rope them in, playing up the Clown's foolery; the jokes grow sharper, the jabs at the occasionally over-eager audience increasingly harsher (at one point an audience member jumps the gun when he seemingly fails to remember the word 'psychologist'; 'Mujhe aata hain,' the Clown retorts. At another point he calls them smart asses, jovially pointing at his much-mocked behind to illustrate his point). It's still mostly comfortable, but there's a hint of something darker that often makes the laughter downright uneasy, even more so as the Clown brushes aside every pathetic past anecdote with yet another ridiculous 'nothing'. The audience is being toyed with. 

There are hints all along: he's a Clown, Pathak keeps reminding his audience. He's a fool, and an ageing one at that. It's his job to laugh, to laugh, even, at nothing, and how pathetic is that? Comedy exists on the other side of despair; turning itself away from the time that is out of joint not because it doesn't recognize it's seriousness, but because it doesn't bear looking into. To do otherwise is to invite madness. Pathak's Clown, Shakespeare's Fool, knows this all along and keeps laughing, laughing, laughing, even when the laughter rings hollow and bitter. He wears not a motley in his brain. And the audience keeps laughing along because who doesn't love a charming, self-deprecating Fool after all?  In the meantime there are repeated attempts at Lear's soliloquy: deliberately buffoonish right in the beginning, competent and theatrical a little while after that (this is how his brother would play it, the Clown tells the audience; they believe him and follow right along). 

The jokes fly thick and fast. ('Yeh kya ho raha hain?' say the two loud teenagers behind us who ultimately walk out midway.)

And then comes the masterstroke: so you've believed everything I say, the Clown asks, right after a heart-wrenching story of rejection by the lost daughter. The Clown, as he'd hinted all along, is an unreliable narrator; the audience his willing accomplices as they laughed along and bought into every anecdote, believed in every heartfelt confession. The narrative stops gazing away from the abyss and plunges headlong into despair. This time the howls come straight from his gut, Lear's horror palpable as he looks at himself and sees only a grotesque fool. There's nothing pathetic about a Clown's tears: that is the domain of tragedy.

Lear howls, 

Oh, you are men of stones.

Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so

That heaven’s vault should crack.

This time there's no tomfoolery, no attempt at self-conscious theatricality: the Clown howls right alongside the old king, a grotesque old fool who is 'nothing' just like Lear. 'A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!' he accuses, and the blame, like the joke, is now on the audience. He's still a Fool, but what of those who laughed at nothing? Nothing will come of nothing—he'll not speak again.

*

I will confess—I had a lump in my throat at the very end, pointlessly considering whether or not it's catharsis if you don't actually cry. The Clown in the meantime had returned where we started, telling us the play hasn't started yet. 

[Rajat Kapoor's Company Theatre performed Hamlet: The Clown Prince and Nothing Like Lear at the Kamani Theatre, New Delhi, in September.]