The story is of a veteran clown who has many reasons to whine about life as do the rest of us: from caviling about the wife who has belied the predicted habituation and grown more insufferable with time, and scoffing at the headlines, to being exercised by the seemingly trivial loss of face caused by the weighty glasses that make it harder for him to turn his nose up at the world that till date gawked - amazed and envious - at him. But, time's trump card is to treacherously whittle down his memory, indulging in a wicked craftsmanship to place on the mantle of his mind the sculpture of his greatest anguish, flashing minor, disjointed details from his life as the sparks that accompany the crackling ember in the fireplace.
The performer that he is, he is invoked by his vocation to animate King Lear on stage. He falters and flounders, failing to remember snatches of the play, meandering often into the melancholy that thickly colors his near monochrome memory. He has, though, imbibed showmanship and can, even when distrait, hold fort against the army of askance stares towards the stage. He jests, and even coarsely suggests to hold his audience in sway. His pain, over the course of the performance, overwhelms him further and further more, till he is almost out of his mind but for the sanity that guides his sombre soliloquy. His despondency devours him as he is thrust into the presence of that pain, that ever-fresh wound that he can no longer cover with the few remaining shreds of recall.
Off the cusp, and consumed, he consummates the Bard's renowned tragedy through an unhindered rendition of the plaintive utterances of the King shocked into awareness by the sight of his beloved daughter's corpse. A fluency courses through his speech, not merely one of words and inflections, but of the darkness from the depths of depression that cuts into your attention that he has in his thrall by then.
The play written and directed by Rajat Kapoor, to me, is an iteration of that maxim about the timelessness of the human condition, with which we - as through our entire history - continue to grapple even today; our situations seeming altered only by the props that populate the stage, while the one at the centre remains the same.
The actor, Atul Kumar, portraying the clown excelled by melding into the tragic protagonist tasked with playing Lear, using his wit and presence of mind in the beginning to draw our focus to him, a focus that was only sharpened as he plunged deeper towards the essence of the play. Bravo!
The title, Nothing Like Lear, is a clever play of words for a play that dusts the words to reveal Lear in our midst.
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