A Bengali adaptation of ‘Hamlet’ takes the stage in Kolkata

Although Swapnasandhani premiered Hamlet in May 2022, just as the restrictions imposed by the covid-19 pandemic were beginning to be eased, the play was revived recently, with a series of performances planned for the coming months. While the production essentially remains the same, the overall acting has gained more depth, most significantly in the performance of the titular hero played by the award-winning actor Riddhi Sen, son of Koushik Sen.

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In the play’s current version, Riddhi, who is in his mid-20s now, seemed to have transformed into an edgier version of the Prince of Denmark. With his bearded look and chiselled figure, he has embraced the rebel streak in Hamlet, which often gets subsumed in the brooding melancholy of the character, and along with it, a certain ruggedness of demeanour. As with any play, each performance remains unique and a work in progress, continuing to refine the intellectual and affective premises of the work, both Shakespeare’s and the Bengali version’s, which has been beautifully translated by Chaiti Mitra.

The Bard in Bengal

Shakespeare has been a long-time presence in Bengal. In his 2023 essay, Shakespeare Comes to Bengal, scholar Sukanta Chaudhuri traces the legacy of the Bard going back to the 18th century, when Othello was first performed in 1780 at the Calcutta Theatre, established in 1775. It would take a few decades for the first “native gentleman" to appear in a Shakespearean play in the city. Once again, it was Othello, performed in 1848, with Baishnav Charan Addy in the lead role at the Sans Souci theatre, built in 1839. A little over a decade later, the first performance of a Shakespeare play (Othello, again) with an all-Bengali cast was staged in 1853.

Since then, Shakespeare had been a living presence in Bengal, both as part of school and college curricula as well as a fixture of the Bengali stage, adapted and recreated over and over. The appeal of his plays was such that by 1900, 39 translations into Bengali existed, with Romeo and Juliet leading the way at 7, followed by Hamlet (6) and Macbeth (5).

“More often than not, the stage versions were free adaptations in Indian settings with added songs and other embellishments," Chaudhuri writes, explaining the rising popular appetite for what is now considered an exalted and esoteric literary work. “What the Bengali public wanted was a melding of Shakespearean drama with the not dissimilar traditional popular theatre or jatra, with its larger-than-life action, rhetorical verse dialogue, abundance of songs and music, and frequent supernaturalism."

In recent times, Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare, especially by Vishal Bharadwaj, have expanded the scope of the plays in an Indian context, as has Bengali cinema, in a movie like Arshinagar, directed by Aparna Sen in 2015, which was based on Romeo and Juliet. The Shakespearean stage was, at the end of the day, a commercial platform, meant to entertain the public, titillate their senses, and provide a break from the mundanity of life. It was only much later that scholars took Shakespeare into the cossetted academic world, analysed his plays as texts rather than treating them as scripts to be enacted and, to an extent, dimmed to his primary appeal as a mass entertainer.

Although Shakespeare became a curriculum staple in Bengal, especially since the founding of the Hindu College in 1817, his appeal on stage remained more or less consistent through the ages. Be it in terms of Bengali translations of his plays or his influence on writers in Bengal, Shakespeare claims a strong place. Rabindranath Tagore, who was set passages from Macbeth to translate into Bengali as a boy, would go on to acknowledge his enduring influence on Bengali writers. As quoted by Chaudhuri, in the preface to his own play Malini, Tagore wrote, “Shakespeare has always been for us the ideal of drama."

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Through the ages

As far as “the ideal of drama" goes, Hamlet epitomises its spirit, perhaps most intensely among all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which makes it incredibly difficult to stage it without a touch of melodrama. For a character whose speaking lines in English run to 358 (in the standard version of the text), the bulk of which is delivered in the form of soliloquys, at an average run-time of 3 hours, it is an immensely challenging part to pull off.

In many productions of Hamlet, the fourth wall with the audience gets demolished. Swapnasandhani’s version takes the idea further by having several of the cast come offstage, mingle with the audience, and comment on the goings-on on the proscenium. If you are under the illusion that the play is what happens on stage, separate from the lives we lead off it, then you’re sorely mistaken here.

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In some other notable shifts, director Koushik Sen casts a woman in the role of Polonius—renamed Polonia—while his wife Reshmi Sen, who plays Gertrude, reimagines costumes that are suitable to a 21st-cenutry scruffiness. Hamlet, Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are mostly in ratty T-shirts, sweatshirts, tattered jeans, and sneakers, carrying knapsacks like any high-schooler or college student (it is what Hamlet is in the original play as well). Surangana Bandyopadhyay, who plays the role of Ophelia to perfection, hums Rabindra Sangeet as her song during her fit madness leading to death.

Shakespeare’s greatness needs no reiteration, but the experience of seeing one of his plays, first written and performed 425 years ago, come alive in 2025 in a language and context that couldn’t be more different is still unique. It is a story that Bengal and Bengalis have owned for over 200 years. To this day, the Empire continues to write back this story, and perform it, freeing it from the hold of the intelligentsia and breathing fresh life into it for everyone.