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For Raj Bisaria theatre activities are not just entertainment. The Padma Shri has spent half a century staging plays in an effort to find clues to the meaning of life and to share these secrets of the universe with everyone who is fortunate enough to know him.
For the same reason Theatre Arts Workshop (TAW), founded by Bisaria in 1966 has been interpreting plays for audiences here by authors from around the world. The most recent presentation by TAW is Harold Pinter's Caretaker, a psychological probe into human relations and questions of how to live together with other human beings without pain and in the midst of death and despair.
Written in 1958 and first staged in London in 1960, The Caretaker is one of Pinter's most performed plays despite its very lonely, gloomy and gray overtone.
Born in 1930, the English actor, director and writer conceived The Caretaker a decade after the havoc caused by World War II. From a Jewish family, Pinter grew up east of London in the midst of a war torn city that had lost countless lives. He saw how war had swallowed up families and many of those who had survived were left to battle a never ending war of nerves.
It was fashionable for doctors to treat psychiatric illnesses using electroshock therapy. This treatment seems to be questioned in the play for having further traumatised patient, like one of the characters in The Caretaker, forcing the audience to wonder if better family relationships and better communication between human beings may not be a better medicine for many a sick mind.
It seems only natural for TAW to stage The Caretaker today when our society is caught in a phase of transition between a socialist economy and capitalist, a traditional society and modern and still largely a rural existence and a more urbanised one where materialism seems to matter more to many than matters of the heart and soul.
The temptation of course is to twist and turn one of the most popular plays of the 2005 winner of the Nobel Prize but in Pinter's own words this is just a story about two brothers and a caretaker.
However this simple story gets its strength and power from terrific performances that director Bisaria has managed to cajole out of Jay Shankar Pandey as the vagabond intruder into the complicated life of the two brothers played by Ashish Tiwari and Prafulla Tripathi in the Hindustani translation of the English play, by Rakesh.
The verdict is that TAW's interpretation of Pinter by Bisaria may be grim but it is awesome.
