You look around...
I had gone to watch 'What's Done is Done' at the St. Andrews auditorium. It is a slightly contemporized and condensed version of the last two acts of Macbeth. Nowadays, I am trying to be frugal, so I got the cheapest seats. To get to these seats, you had to climb up a long flight of stairs and risk a nosebleed.
I looked around. It was a full house. And for a large auditorium like Andrews, that felt quite lively. (Even Devil Wears Prada 2 had three empty rows in Juhu PVR, a theatre slightly larger than a regular living room). I was seated next to a chattering group of young kids – three of whom had tattoos of a guitar on fire and septum rings. None of them seemed to know what the play was about, and all of them were scrambling to use ChatGPT to get them up to speed. Then none of them wanted to actually read the responses. So the seemingly most clued-in of the lot started explaining the plot.
I couldn’t help but overhear. At a point, I had to interject and tell the orator that the plot he was explaining was Hamlet, not Macbeth. I was asked, “What diff?” by someone with curly hair tied back with a tie-dye bandana. I explained “The diff”, albeit a little sternly.
The group seemed to be satisfied with my response. One girl in the group, wearing sparkly sneakers, thanked me. She further remarked that Shakespeare’s plays seemed to be like Tarantino’s movies – some variation of the same thing – stylized violence or regicide. (Young people have a way of exasperating you in such unique and fresh ways.)
As I now started defending both Shakespeare and Tarantino, the curtain rose, and the play began. Rajat Kapoor played a rather underwhelming Macbeth, I thought. But the rest of it was really good.
And the final closing, when the witches’ last prophecy comes true…even this Tarantino-adoring crowd had collapsed a little bit in their seats with the twist in the story.
Even after all these years, after so many retellings, so many analogies and deviations and morphisms and mutilations, you hit that paradox of the ephemeralness of time and the everlasting nature of avarice…and the mastery of Shakespeare.
I looked around. It was a full house. And for a large auditorium like Andrews, that felt quite lively. (Even Devil Wears Prada 2 had three empty rows in Juhu PVR, a theatre slightly larger than a regular living room). I was seated next to a chattering group of young kids – three of whom had tattoos of a guitar on fire and septum rings. None of them seemed to know what the play was about, and all of them were scrambling to use ChatGPT to get them up to speed. Then none of them wanted to actually read the responses. So the seemingly most clued-in of the lot started explaining the plot.
I couldn’t help but overhear. At a point, I had to interject and tell the orator that the plot he was explaining was Hamlet, not Macbeth. I was asked, “What diff?” by someone with curly hair tied back with a tie-dye bandana. I explained “The diff”, albeit a little sternly.
The group seemed to be satisfied with my response. One girl in the group, wearing sparkly sneakers, thanked me. She further remarked that Shakespeare’s plays seemed to be like Tarantino’s movies – some variation of the same thing – stylized violence or regicide. (Young people have a way of exasperating you in such unique and fresh ways.)
As I now started defending both Shakespeare and Tarantino, the curtain rose, and the play began. Rajat Kapoor played a rather underwhelming Macbeth, I thought. But the rest of it was really good.
And the final closing, when the witches’ last prophecy comes true…even this Tarantino-adoring crowd had collapsed a little bit in their seats with the twist in the story.
Even after all these years, after so many retellings, so many analogies and deviations and morphisms and mutilations, you hit that paradox of the ephemeralness of time and the everlasting nature of avarice…and the mastery of Shakespeare.
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