The NSD Rep Company’s latest play directed by the Uzbek director Ovlyakuli Khodjakuli is a visual enactment of the 19th century Russian poet and author Pushkin’s Little Big Tragedies. The three stories are bound together in performance that relies on sound and body movements as expression of the meaning of the word tragedy in art. Pushkin believed in creating tragedy within the framework of an ideological art unity, and was keen to explore of how art develops in divergence and disagreements. Each of the three tragedies serves as an illustration of some or the other moral fault — jealousy in the Mozart and Salieri, adultery in Stone Guest and arrogance in The Feast during the Plague.
Salver’s jealousy of Mozart is legendry and was the subject of the play Amadeus also made into a film. In this play, we see Antonio Salieri enviously speaking about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s effortless art and how nature had unjustly bestowed rare talent upon Mozart. He thinks Mozart is a threat to music and compares him to a ‘cherub from paradise who has flown down to earth to raise wingless desires among people. The choreographer Gilles Chuyen is in his elements in the first story as he has words and images to work upon. As Salieri speaks, the members of the chorus of actors, seven in number signifying the seven notes in music, enact the feeling the words create.
Convinced that Mozart is a threat to the genre of music, and that he Salieri has been allotted the task of ridding the world of this ‘cherub from paradise who has come down on earth to raise wingless desires in people ’, Salieri plots Mozart’s death. The chorus move their bodies to what Mozart says providing music and rhythm with their implements (cups, plates, mugs glasses tiny bells and other metal objects). Swayed by his own argument that destiny has chosen him to rid the earth of this menace Mozart, Salieri poisons his glass, even as Mozart raises a toast to harmony.
The set design by Ovlyakuli Khojakuli is a Yurt, a nomadic tent, with spaces to enter and exit cut along the sides. Occupying the entire stage with its ropes and pegs, it has a mounted figure atop of a man with long arms representing the Stone Guest of the second story. It is a story on the theme of Don Juan who seduced women at will and was known as a philanderer and an adventurer.
The costumes change colours from yellow in the first to red in the second and the third in duller shades. However, the design remains the same flowing pant-like pyjamas cut away to the waist on one side forming pennants in the breeze. The torso is covered in a flowing billowing sheet of silk, which is brilliantly used by the actors in the first play to create moulded figures of great imagination and some beauty. In the second play, the costumes with their sheets become rather boring. In the last play both the repetitive choreography, design and the costumes begin to pall.
In fact the last play is perhaps the most difficult to probe and explore for meaning and almost impossible to sit through. Translation of a scene from John Wilson’s The City of the Plague, in the midst of merrymaking a young man calls everyone to stop their merrymaking and raise a toast to a friend who died of the plague. Walshingham asks for quiet and request’s Mary to sing something. She sings about how the plague devastated her village and killed everyone long long ago. The innovative part of the design was in the manner of shaking the glasses at the party.