Girish Karnad’s Flowers is based on a folktale from Chitradurg, which tells the story of a priest (played by Rajit Kapur) whose world revolves around his love for God and his mistress. Karnad uses this premise to set up an enquiry into the faith, morality, justice, love and the very nature of God itself. The script is inherently erotic and humane. And yet it manages to ask the most pertinent of philosophical questions with a poignant and lucid ease. It is precise and quaint; at times so well thought-out, it might begin to seem contrived. But the manner in which Karnad combines the magic of a gripping folk tale so seamlessly with issues at once contemporary and eternal is deft enough to redeem the piece from minor shortcomings. A monologue in theatre almost invariably tends to fall back on the actor’s story telling technique but the point at which Kapur’s characters is in the play does not allow him to live the experiences he is narrating emotionally. He is for the most part detached, narrating everything, good or bad, in a gloomy, reflective monotone. The director, Roysten Abel, then has to rely on the visual and musical elements to tap the dramatic potential of the narrative and he does that well, without imposing theatricality on the piece. His set is surreal and dramatic, resplendent with a kind of rough beauty. The lighting however, attracts attention with its artificial sharpness taking away from the otherwise accidental and careless nature of the aesthetics. The smoke with the smell of incense and crushed flowers that fills the air is a fine example of how the live nature of the medium can be used to its fullest potential to draw the audience completely into the world of the play. The decision to place his actor on a platform suspended in mid-air creates powerfully the sense of isolation of the character, his shame, guilt and quandary as he stands exposed and alienated in the middle of nowhere having put himself on trial. Although there is a price to be paid for the representation as a lot of the audience that is seated in positions which obscure the actor feels completely alienated from the entire performance. The positioning also means that there is minimal movement throughout. As a result, often there is very little to distinguish the performance from a book reading. But the stillness that Kapur brings to his performance has a gradual calming effect on the audience, which begins to focus meditatively on him, getting completely involved with the intricacies of the script’s rhythm. Kapur steps outside of himself to deliver a remarkably self-assured performance. He does not lean on histrionics while wielding the written word with utmost respect and trusting it to see him through. A larger debate about what qualifies as theatre rages on. And often a monologue delivered sans props and dramatic action is viewed suspiciously in this context. But in this case, the way in which the acting, direction and writing aspects come together to transport the audience as far into themselves as out into another magical world, there can be little doubt that Flowers is theatre-in its most glorious form.

This year’s feast of theatre at Ranga Shankara opened with Girish Karnad’s dramatic monologue, Flowers, directed by Roysten Abel, performed by Rajit Kapur and jointly produced by Ranga Shankara and Rage. Abel was here in August with the hugely successful Othello in Black and White and the city is fortunate to have another chance to view this man’s talent. Rajit Kapur has not been on Bangalore stages recently, but the festival this year allows us to watch him twice, once as the tormented priest in Flowers and then closing the festival as a Rajasthani yokel in Jameela Bai Khalaali. Karnad returns to his métier with this re-telling of a folk tale from northern Karnataka that he first encountered twenty years ago. Karnad transforms traditional stories about boons and curses, karma and dharma into modern explorations of love, desire and betrayal. Here, for the first time, we see the same torments and longings played out between a man and the two poles of his life - his intense devotion to his god and his obsession with a courtesan. In a further refinement of the theme that recurs in Karnad’s plays, i.e. the search for wholeness and the harmonious integration of internal conflict, the tension in Flowers is sublimated to the opposition between desire for the experience of worldly pleasure and the equally strong pull to transcend that desire and surrender to higher truth, a deeper reality. In this play, an unnamed priest sits alone and talks about the last few tumultuous days in his life - he confesses his obsessive love for a courtesan and his fall from grace in his own eyes as he betrays first his wife, then his local chieftain and ultimately his beloved deity for a woman who not only introduces him to sensual pleasure but animates his incredible talent with flower decoration. Her warm, responsive body and the cold, implacability of his beloved lingam become the opposite expressions of his devotion and his bhakti finds not simply a new object, but a compelling new inspiration. And when he transgresses, he asks his god to give him a way to live. The resulting miracle plunges him into an existential crisis of cosmic proportions and we listen as he tells us what happened and watch, helplessly, as he decides what he needs to do next. Without any doubt, this is a remarkably beautiful piece of writing, with Karnad’s almost archaic locutions, coloring this complex and moving monologue as a man searches his soul and searches also, for his soul. The question that arises is about the stage-ability of Flowers - how do you take an internal crisis and place it on stage with a single actor and a temple. What is theatrical about the way this story has been told? And this is where Abel displays his courageous vision as a director yet again. If Othello and the emotions it unleashes can be played with one ragged cloak as a “costume”, here, Abel pushes his audience, his actor and the “play” to the limit. Rajit Kapur is called upon to hold his audience for well over an hour with nothing but Karnad’s anguished words and the emotional resonance and truth that he can bring to them. Kapur has to have the audience in the palm of his hand in the first five minutes to make the monologue work, for us to engage with this man who has been tested by his god, to become the unseen confessors as he tells the story of his transgression and pleads for a way to make sense of it all. There is nothing to help Kapur-he appears as if suspended in mid-air, a man at the agonizing moment between a life fulfilled and the choice of death, a man torn between the transcendence that his god offers him and his attachment to a world suddenly brought alive, made painfully real, by sexual desire. Abel and Kapur together push the stillness at the heart of the play and what had been the stillness in the heart of the priest to its very limit. Motionless for the most part, suspended, lit such that the waters of the temple tank cast light upon his face, Kapur has to reach deep into the reservoir of his talent to mesmerize an audience more accustomed to physical movement and emotional action on stage. Arghya Lahiri’s lighting design for Flowers is the best that I have seen in a long time. This man is young enough to participate in Thespo’s youth theatre festival but mature and talented enough to hold his own with the technical rigour and flawless production that a group like Rage demands and delivers. Amit Heri’s minimalist score suffuses the senses: it is blue like the watery light that envelopes the audience and the performer, redolent like the performance space filled with the smell of the flowers that the priest uses as the expression of his devotion to his god and his woman. But the night belongs, finally, to Rajit and Roy for bringing an incredibly challenging piece of writing from one of our best playwrights to life in a way that we sit in silence after the performance has ended.

Logic, and the utter lack of it. Measured by the breadth of a strand of hair, deciding the future course of life. Is that really the message or point to ponder in playwright Girish Karnad’s latest offering Flowers? Directed by acclaimed director Roysten Abel, who’s riding on the success of his rendition of Shakespeare, Flowers is a monologue with the brilliant Rajit Kapur. The play, the first of Ranga Shankara’s theatre festival, had its premiere on Saturday and opens formally on Sunday. It’s quintessential Karnad at work- take a snippet from the treasure trove of Indian literature, turn a germ of an idea into a conflagration. With rich prose, Indian settings and, of course, with very Indian sensibilities too. The theme of Flowers finds a fleeting reference in Ta Ra Subbarao’s Hamsageethe, penned over 50 years ago. A Brahmin priest, married, whose association with the lingam deity is as old as him, falls in love with a courtesan. His initial feeling - “I who have never lusted for a woman, now feel emasculated by my weakness”- predictably turns into a visit at her doorstep. And the consequent scandal, of decking her with flowers the way he decks his Lord with garlands. The winner is the script and Rajit Kapur. The man (a priest) seduces with his description of how he decked Chandra with parijatha, mallige, kanakambare, sampige and even sheds a genuine tear. The way he carries the narrative, at the end you feel he must have aged and whitened his beard. Spartan and innovative settings-he talks to you from a platform built on the stage. Sustaining an adult audience with one actor, minimal or no movement, the only music being the chirping of bird, is no mean task. And this is where Karnad once again displays his superior command of the language. All of one hour is sustained on the strength of words, evocative phrases. Actually, the play is like reading a novel, except the actor is narrating sentences, even feeling them for you, transporting you to places, be it the temple, or the courtesan’s house of even a glimpse of the furtive scuffles that pass off as conjugal union in the priest’s house. Does the priest’s sacrilege get caught? Yes. What happens then is like telling it. Somebody got it right—God works in mysterious ways, there’s no logic.

Flowers ran to packed houses at Prithvi during the Gudi Padva week. Bangalore’s Ranga Shankara and Mumbai’s Rage collaborated on the production. The one-person dramatic monologue by Girish Karnad (Bangalore), is directed by Roysten Abel (Delhi) and enacted by Rajit Kapur (Mumbai).With such a confluence of artists, the play was bound to be a unique theatre event. Consequently, miles of media hype preceded it six-day run, spiced up by a tantalizing one-line description of the play-a temple priest is caught between his love of god, wife and courtesan. Like all one-line description, this too proved to be vastly inadequate. “Love” hardly describes the priest’s four equally demanding relationships, which include his loyaltyto the local chieftain. With Shiva, the priest’s devotion is obsessively ritualistic, finding expression in new ways to adorn the lingam with flowers. For the courtesan Chandravathi, he suffers obsessive lust. Having heard of his great artistry with flowers, she asks for her naked body to be similarly adorned. He obeys, wordlessly attending to her every seductive curve. This too becomes a daily ritual, metaphorically playing out the concept of the union of male-female energies inherent in Shiva Bhakti. The priest has earlier described the lingam as a phallus erect in the vulva, deliberately returning the icon to its material origins. The life of the spirit and the life of the body thus come together, both distanced from the life of the community. God resides above the community by his own rules; the courtesan outside it, beyond its rules. Between the two ends lie lesser values like loyalty to the chieftain and duty to the wife. The wife is not so much woman, as mother. Her physicality contrasts sharply with Chandravathi’s. Unfortunately, Karnad chooses to couch the contrast in time worn cliché of male desire, robbing it of its potential significance. Chandravathi is described as possessing a deep cleavage with an inviting mole on one breast while the wife is thin with no breasts to speak of. Chandravathi’s sexuality invites lust, which the priest describes with another cliché as “the fire raging in my loins”. The wife’s sexuality invites compassion followed by rejection. The ultimate question that Flowers poses, however, is not about the priest’s social-sexual dilemma, but about how he sees god, and himself in relation to god. One fateful night, a series of unusual circumstances compels him to decorate the lingam with flowers hurriedly taken off the courtesan’s body. The sacrilege horrifies the wife, the chieftain and the community. But god shows that he is on his bhakta’s side. The priest achieves instant sainthood in the eyes of the credulous community. But god’s grace under such circumstances is unacceptable to the priest. Why have you blessed me despite my transgressions, he asks, forgetting that man cannot ask god to explain himself. Rational questions shatter faith, which is the very centre of the man-god relationship as envisaged by man. Without faith, there’s no hope. Roysten Abel underlines and intensifies the priest’s internal conflict by confining the actor to a narrow platform high above the stage. Only minimal movements are possible here. Down below stands a broad vessel of water representing the temple tank. Arghya Lahiri’s lighting isolates the platform, the man and the vessel. The rest of the stage is cloaked in hazy darkness. The rippling reflections in the blue-lit water are the only bright spots. But their brightness makes the dark even darker. The stunningly dramatic set and lighting are offset by the neutral tone of Rajit Kapur’s narration. The decision to undercut drama in the monologue is faultless. It adds an extra edge to the riskiness of the actor’s positioning on the platform, since a neutral narration can easily slip into flatness. Yet, save for a lapse or two, Kapur compels total attention through the entire 70 minutes length of the monologue. It is an impressive feat.

“I had never lusted for a woman before,” says the priest (Rajit Kapur) in Girish Karnad’s first play written in English. “I could not control the fire raging in my loins.” Karnad’s latest venture is the riveting confession of a conflicted mind, crammed with lyrical memories of duty versus desire. These play out on a mystical set embellished with white jasmine flowers scattered on the floor and the soothing noise of the water from the urli. When the play starts, though, the priest, because of his lacklustre relationship with his wife, centres most of his energies on Shiva’s lingam in his temple – he discusses politics with it and adorns it with milk and flowers. His obsession with the idol remains undisturbed until he meets the courtesan Chandravati. The flowers on the lingam are now ornaments for his paramour’s body and the once-devoted priest is an unfaithful husband. Karnad presents an incisive sketch of the priest, who falls from a pious devotee to a man consumed with lust. The incongruity of a priest eulogising about the female body strikes you as rather creepy. Kapur is largely stationary on a ten-foot-high beam throughout the play, but with his near-flawless performance and so much heart behind the production, you wouldn’t want to miss out on Flowers. Since Kapur looks down on the stage from a height, it’s best watched from the back row, where you can fully experience the impact of a powerful climax.