The fifth season of the Aditya Birla Group’s Aadyam initiative springs off the blocks with a production of Alan Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, a play most famous in its 1992 movie version featuring histrionic powerhouse Jack Nicholson. The tribunal drama was first produced on stage three years before the film, and takes us straight to the heart of the expectedly contentious court martial of two marines accused of murder, set against the cloak-and-dagger backdrop of military intrigue. It was based on actual events that took place at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in July 1986, although dramatic liberty has likely contributed much to its appeal and longevity. Its original Broadway run opened to much acclaim at New York’s century-old Music Box Theatre, stopping just short of 500 performances. There have umpteen revivals since, as well as international versions in several languages like Spanish, German and Hungarian. Helming this new Mumbai production is Nadir Khan, English theatre’s Mr Dependable, who has directed a play in each prior season of Aadyam, across diverse genres, from the high-strung chamber piece Gods of Carnage to the opulent homegrown musical #SingIndiaSing to the intimate rites-of-passage drama Anand Express.
Crackling writing
Khan says that it is purely by coincidence that A Few Good Men is his second stab at a courtroom drama since 2016’s 12 Angry Jurors. Unlike that production, this play hasn’t been adapted into Indian contexts, although the legalese peppering the text has been unpacked.
One courtroom drama that’s thriving on the Indian stage is Swadesh Deepak’s Court Martial (in Hindi), which is often called out for its similarities with Sorkin’s play, and has been staged in the thousands in several Indian languages.
For Khan, the original stood majestically on its own feet. “What appealed to me was Sorkin’s writing, crackling off the page, lending itself to a quickly unfolding stage experience that called for actors of a certain calibre,” he explains. Rather than Sorkin’s deliriously popular The West Wing, Khan is more impressed by Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, ironically the only Sorkin show not to air for more than one season. “What was important to drive home to the actors was the truth of the line. This is a play about morality as a code, rather than the miscarriage of justice,” explains Khan, of the challenges of mounting work in which even the indefensible must be defended.
Nicholson’s unscrupulous colonel, played here by the formidable Rajit Kapur, occupies the greys of the proceedings with considerable aplomb. Ira Dubey essays the role of the defence lawyer, the sole woman in an all-male setup, while Neil Bhoopalam is Daniel A. Kaffee, a lawyer with a predilection for plea bargains.
Director’s lens
Much of English theatre in India, created from international scripts, end up coming across as derivative or aspirational. Khan’s plays have escaped that categorisation, “Ultimately, I look at the play with my particular lens. My age, the friends I have, the experiences I’ve had, all go a long way towards making my work original,” he says. Khan believes that one of the reasons he’s an Aadyam regular is his appreciation of the scale and sensibility of the proscenium-based productions they’re looking to produce. According to Khan, theatre groups that don’t really understand this — the word ‘esoteric’ comes up more than once — might flounder on such a platform. He cites Anand Express as his own attempt at amplifying an intimate piece of theatre to fit a larger stage, that led to mixed results.
Khan has completed 20 years in the business; the 1998 college production, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, was his first brush with theatre. From that durational vantage, he has observed wide-ranging changes in theatre in English, which has resulted in it becoming much more accessible, all but losing its elitist tag, even if the politics of language isn’t quite settled in the country.
A Few Good Men opens at St. Andrews Auditorium on July 20; more details at Paytm and insider.in.