The Sunday Guardian: Robinson Remixed; Kaivalya treats book lovers to darkly funny Cortázar play
We're excited to share that our staging of the radio play Goodbye Robinson, written by Julio Cortázar was featured in The Sunday Guardian in a piece by Aditya Mani Jha.
The performance was staged in collaboration with the Instituto Cervantes Nueva Delhi and the Embassy of Argentina in New Delhi on account of the author's birthday celebrations.
Here is a short excerpt from the article:
Goodbye Robinson is a postcolonial retelling of Robinson Crusoe's adventure. Just like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea questions the treatment of Bertha Mason, Jane Eyre's "mad woman in the attic", this play subverts the way Friday thinks and speaks about his master-slave relationship with Crusoe. For starters, Friday buttons his lines with a weird, mirthless half-giggle (brought out particularly well by the actor playing Friday), upon which Crusoe asks for explanatory notes. Friday then delivers this hilarious response: "The truth is there is nothing funny about it, master. I don't get it either, trust me, it's something completely involuntary. I have consulted two psychoanalysts, one Freudian and the other Jungian in order to double the odds, like we do at the racecourse, and to be on the safer side, I also got myself examined by one of counter-psychology's leading lights. By the way, he was the only one who accepted me as the Friday of your book without a shadow of doubt."
It felt a little strange, at first, to "watch" a radio play instead of listening to it, but the performances of the whole cast more than made up for it. As director Varoon P. Anand explained after the show, all the songs used were Argentinian Spanish songs, to go with the spatio-temporal setting of the play. "There was one song that had a lot of naughty words in Spanish, so we apologise for that. Of course, if you don't know Spanish, you don't know what you heard..."
Read the full article on The Sunday Guardian Website here.
