I am struck by a situation that is generating characters, charades, and challenges of a different nature. To a student of literature and theatre, a teacher and writer of plays, this surfeit of metaphors and images is not an ordinary event. People in the country are debating about dramatic events that the German playwright Bertotlt Brecht would have called ‘epic theatre’ if he were to rise here now. Dramatic events imply fast changing times and somersaults of characters. In Nepal, such dramatic events are seen in the political sphere, and in how the polity and people interact with each other.

The state, for that matter, the government, is experimenting with ideology, spirituality, pragmatics, crony capitalist practices and ethics. Nobody remains outside the purview of politics. Even a Gandhian doctor on his 23rd day of fast-on-to-death—for a simple cause of making medical education accessible to the people who are deprived of that—-has posed challenges to those who want to address him only by giving him a political identity. The most dramatic and bizarre development is the debate among the ruling and opposition parties to drag him into the clichéd Communist-Congress binary.

But there are many other events that suggest a trifle surreal in nature. They are surreal because the events generally happen in the twilight zones. To take a few examples, they are political but their character is shaped by money; they are strategic but they are not reaching very far; they are socialist but they are shaped by capitalist practices.

‘Bathtub’

At this very juncture of time, artistic theatre director Yubaraj Ghimire, alias Ghiyu, invited me to go over to Shilpee Theatre to see a play entitled ‘Bathtub’ written by a well-known experimentalist Nepali fiction writer Kumar Nagarkoti.

For theatre academics like Shiva Rijal and myself, this invitation promised to offer something fresh in theatre after some time. The play, written by a literary writer par excellence, dwells on questions that have challenged us for a couple of decades at the university. In the realms of criticism, it evokes its central themes.

They are the ‘death of the author’, a theme introduced by the French philosopher Roland Barthes, and supported even by literary critics. The eternal questions of the writer-reader dialogic or dialectic relationship rest on the theme of who decides the meaning. Without wishing to write academic cliché here, I must at least mention this line of argument because Nagarkoti bhai’s play has strongly dramatised these problematics that have dogged literary critics for some time. For me, this is also a new challenge. When I revisit my earlier volumes of literary criticism, I find the canon, which is based on the theory that the author is the shaper of meaning and the reader is a passive recipient, dominating my writing. But my position has gradually changed over the years.

Kumar Nagarkoti has overtly used the theatre perceptions by clearly mentioning the absurd theatre of Samuel Beckett, the gaps left by Shakespeare and Laxmi Prasad Devkota. Nagarkoti has very overtly used what we call ‘meta-literary’ perspective in this play.

He has used the familiar critical terminologies like ‘grand narrative’ and ‘surreal’. I would want the Nepali writers and literary critics to see this play. In his January 29th review for the Kathmandu Post, Pranaya SJB Rana—the new age fiction writer who writes in English—called this play ‘deliciously dark, superbly surreal’. Rana has made a unique combination of theatre and literary or textual criticism in this short review piece. Besides this, there were also a couple other Nepali reviews of this performance in Kantipur and Nayapatrika.

In her debut show, Bhushita Vashistha has handled the most complex responsibilities of a female actor. This play revolves around the character Anidra who bears the brunt of male characters’ follies, their arrogance, their failed chivalries, their bravados and their false gestures of love and their secret desires of going down in the imaginary trails of women lovers as the mythic characters and create ‘past’. Bhushita’s smoothness, wakefulness and flexibility in performing her role was especially commendable. Neer Shaha was a perfect choice for a Rana man turned writer who is trying to write fiction by struggling with the amorphous characters. Brajesh Khanal’s acting is suitable for that cinematic segment of the play.

But all the characters are curiously created and they all look defeated by the avant-gardist experimentalist writer Kumar Nagarkoti. Yubaraj Ghimire’s difficult role as a director can be seen in creating a rapprochement between not only the characters and the playwright, but also between a fiction writer and playwright Nagarkoti. I appreciate his work.

Experiential theatre

Having said all this, I would like to repeat a few caveats. Theatre, unlike fiction, always struggles to make its achievement through simplicity, which is, ironically, the most difficult task. The very medium of theatre calls for such efforts. Theatre experiments though they appear to be heavily introducing the elements of complexity deeply carry an element of simplicity.

As the distance between the characters and the audience is close, it becomes the responsibility of the playwright, the director and those who create theatre, to honour the covenant. That is why a short play should resist the temptation of making intellectual, theatrical and academic demands at the same time. I have learned this from my own experiences and exposures.

Kumar Nagarkoti’s fictional works are experimental and free from any sense of limitations of time and place. He can create, which means he has the capacity of invention and experiment, a quality, which is unique to him. Therefore, anyone going to see “Bathtub” should know that this play is a quintessential part of Nagarkoti’s fictional creation and his sense of learned experiment informed with literary knowledge.

To sum up, ‘Bathtub’ very interestingly dramatises not only the text the writer has written, and that the characters have acted out, but also the condition that we are grappling with today. In that sense, this play walks out of the world of myth, mysticism, history and traumatic memories to the reality that we are experiencing today to make it liveable and human.