IT IS MODERN-DAY KABUL—on stage, that is—and three men, two of them in Western attire, huddle over a pot of tea. The third man, a chaiwala in traditional Afghan garb, confronts the pair with a question. “Do you speak Dari?” he asks. One of the foreigners responds indignantly: “I’m Afghan, but I’m from Samarkand.” The local is alarmed at this disclosure, and promptly gives the foreigners Afghan clothes. Samarkandis aren’t welcome in Kabul, he explains.
In advance of their appearance at the Globe Theatre in London in May, the Afghan theatre group Rah-e-Sabz performed in Delhi their Persian adaptation of Shakespeare’s amoral and raucous Comedy of Errors, Komedy-e-Eshtebahat: a feisty but serious farce, set not in far-off Greece, but in their own troubled country.
In The Comedy of Errors, a pair of identical twin brothers and their twin servants are separated at birth. Years later, as one pair of twins search for the other pair in the city of Ephesus, the families and servants of the two brothers confuse the two. In Komedy-e-Eshtebahat the modern cities of Samarkand and Kabul are depicted as sharing a hostile relationship similar to the trade cities of Syracuse and Ephesus in the late 16th-century Elizabethan comedy. Basir Haider, who plays the role of Bostan, one of the twin servants, finds the modern comparison amusing because Afghanistan and Uzbekistan are involved in trade, and the relationship between the two countries’ governments is friendly. In fact, the two countries are connected by the Afghanistan-Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge.
“Peshawar and Kabul would have been more realistic because Afghans don’t like Pakistanis, and Pakistanis don’t like Afghans,” Haider says. “But the political situation doesn’t permit such a portrayal of Peshawar and Kabul.” Why Samarkand then? “The people are more open-minded there,” he says with a smile, adding that the group had consulted theatre groups in Samarkand to ensure the propriety of the representation.
Komedy-e-Eshtebahat cleverly handled the changed contexts, but the challenges of adaptation remained. “There were problems with calling someone a prostitute, especially in the Afghan and Indian cultures,” Haider says. “Another word was used for it, which has the same meaning but is more acceptable.”
Even within such constraints, though, the production played up the notion of fidelity to Shakespeare’s text—the translation chosen, for instance, was one in ancient Persian, a language that is perhaps archaic to modern Persian speakers in the same manner that Elizabethan English is to modern English speakers. “The dialogues were also hard for us because they were translated into ancient Persian—not Dari, which is what we speak today,” Haider says. This choice, unsurprisingly, didn’t appear to register with Indians who don’t speak Persian. But the loyalty to the original English text was evident in the surtitles, which comprised Shakespeare’s original words, apart from a few scenes added by the group.
This postcolonial reverence for “authentic Shakespeare”, however, did not undermine the admirable linguistic and geographic translations of the adaptation. The sea-storm that divides the brothers at birth, for instance, was converted into a sandstorm in the Persian play: sandstorms are common in Afghanistan and have separated families in the past. One unexpected result of the reworked political context of a largely unchanged plot was a complete shift in the emotional register of its climax. The ending—in which identities and order are predictably restored—was, unlike in Shakespeare’s play, disquietingly serious. The proximity—and proximate gravity—of the play’s events led the Delhi audience to an unusual silence when the disbelieving parents of the twins embraced each other after decades of separation. The comic resolution was put off, and the audience was allowed to appreciate the poignancy of the family’s reunion.
The audience at the Delhi show seemed to enjoy both the comic and the more sentimental moments of the play. But watching their heads swivel from stage to surtitles, one wondered whether they were less interested in the surtitles than in the fact that it was the first time they were seeing a contemporary Afghan story unfold before them.