May 23, 2017
By Jacob Davis
Charles Dickens better make room on his pedestal. One of the most hotly anticipated shows of the season, Tanika Gupta’s adaptation of Great Expectations, opened to rave reviews and a delighted audience on May 20th at the Chicago Temple Building. The production is a collaboration between Remy Bumppo, a company that focuses on intellectual literature, and Silk Road Rising, which is devoted to the Asian and Middle Eastern experience and makes its home in the skyscraper church. In Bengali-British playwright Gupta’s 2010 adaptation, the action of the story is moved to 1861 India. Dickens’s story was that of a poor young boy whose mysterious benefactor molds him into a haughty and wasteful gentleman before a crises forces him to acknowledge who he really is. But Gupta’s interrogates the colonial system and the confusion it fostered among the educated Indians it produced to serve as the middle-men of the Empire.
That’s not the only change. We hear the protagonist, Pip, before we see him. He is crying in a crematorium late at night, and it is clear that the audience no longer has Dickens’s ironically detached adult perspective to hide behind. In the book, the reader’s introduction to the protagonist, Pip, is a humorous description of how he imagined his parents to be based on the font of their names on their headstones, but here, the audience only sees a tall boy, played by Anand Bhatt, in wretched misery, clinging to all that’s left of life before he was put under the hand of his tyrannical sister (Alka Nayyar). It gets worse for him. Out of the shadows leaps Magwich (Robert D. Hardaway), an African escaped convict. We see in his wicked grin how much he enjoys terrifying the child, with the rattling of his chains emphasizing each of this threats as he demands the boy bring him food and tools. And Magwich is nowhere close to being the worst thing in the dark that night, nor will Pip have seen the last of any of them.
Over the course of the three-hour long play, Bhatt is nearly always onstage. In him, we see Pip go from a timid, sad, but kind-hearted and generous boy to an arrogant and pretentious young man attempting to distance himself from his abused former self. Pip never really loses the kindness in his core, but he always has a tendency to see the worst in people and see his own better nature as servility. His moral center is his brother-in-law, Joe Gargery (Anish Jethmalani), a simple man afforded more dignity by Gupta’s script than he possessed in Dickens’s original. But Joe represents a past Pip could not return to even if it suited him; the future of India is expressed by his childhood friend, Biddy (Rasika Ranganathan). Or, at least, the future she imagines in which people will read both English and Bengali literature is one possibility, but Pip has a hard time believing that. His sister always told him that their low-caste marriage for necessity’s fate was a miserable fate even before he knew anything of English modernity.
Soon after his encounter with Magwich, Pip is brought to the ghastly Anglo-Indian landowner, Miss Havisham (Linda Gillum). A wraith-like woman who seems to take perverse pride in declaring that her heart was broken when her fiancé fled, Miss Havisham lives to pass her misery on to others. Living with her is a half-Indian, half-African girl, Estella (Netta Walker), who devastatingly confirms to Pip that he is not only ignorant and smelly, but far too low for a beautiful girl like her. Gillum’s Miss Havisham is the classical Dickensian villain: an extreme manifestation of evil as seen from the point-of-view of a child, but without Dickens’s first-person narration, her twisted mind is even more disconcerting. As for Netta Walker, her performance as Estella is subtly textured by the glances and graceful gestures that offer a hint into the manipulative Estalla’s true thoughts. She is thrilled by her power over Pip; perhaps it is the first power she has ever wielded in her life. When we see Estella as an adult, she has matured, but like Bhatt’s Pip, is still basically the same person only more cunning and more confused.
Silk Road Rising expanded the size of its usual playing space by removing a few rows of chairs, providing the directors with much more room on which to stage crowd scenes. The show has a cast of twelve, but the transitions are seamless and the fight scenes are impeccably choreographed. The projections designed by Yeaji Kim show the passage of time and evoke the atmosphere of locations such as the dreary abode of Miss Havisham and the chaos of the street of Calcutta without the need for cumbersome changes to her set. The props by Abigail Cain, sound design by Spencer Batho and Ronnie Malley, lighting by Lindsey Lyddan, and costumes by Elsa Hiltner further flesh out the world of nineteenth century India to the point where one can almost smell the firewood in Pip’s village.
Ninety percent of the dialogue is taken from the book. The remaining ten percent is crucial to expanding the story’s themes to cover Pip’s colonized mindset. Pip’s struggle to come to terms with his origin so well integrated with Dickens’s exploration of middle-class social climbing that a person who comes to the story fresh will hardly be able to tell what is Dickens’s and what is Gupta’s. Rarely do the strengths of two different theatre companies better complement each other. Just as Gupta wrote about the way Great Expectations had always resonated with her, Remy Bumppo’s collaboration with Silk Road Rising enables them to capture the meaning of every line of the script and every moment in between. Despite the story’s epic length, nothing is superfluous and nothing drags. On top of providing a multi-faced look at the British Empire’s legacy of unequal cultural interactions, it is an exciting adventure and a moving character study.