A reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that traces South Asian displacement from the 1947 Partition to present-day Britain will have its premiere at Birmingham’s Midlands Arts Centre on October 6.
“The Chronicle of Two Worlds” is written and directed by Shahman Moishan, associate professor and chairman of Theatre and Performance Studies at Dhaka University. Professor Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, is dramaturg for the production.
The play recasts Hamlet’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Rojob and Gonesh, two actors whose families were uprooted by Partition and who later moved to England, where they joined a theatre company. During rehearsals, the pair begin to question their position: while the play’s principal characters are treated with respect, they are given no identity of their own and no lasting resting place. Recognising themselves as victims of historical and political systems, they reject the roles the company has imposed on them and rebel by putting their own lives, feelings and silences on stage.
The production sets the 1947 Partition and the 1971 Liberation War alongside the identity, memory, displacement and cultural experience of South Asian migrants in contemporary Britain. It explores two layers, “Theatre and Life”, through the personal stories of people caught between histories, languages and questions of belonging.
Aniruddha Chakravarti and Tarek Chowdhury perform. Makbul Chowdhury, a British Bangladeshi filmmaker, visual artist and documentary director, and the creative director of Bangla Connection, designed the digital scenography and sound.
Moishan said his research had centred on how Shakespeare was practised in South Asia through the colonial connection, and how he could be read anew through the region’s political and aesthetic lenses. “This production is a continuation of that thinking,” he said.
On rebuilding Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he said: “They are very minor, marginal figures on Hamlet’s famous canvas, wiped out as victims of the political system. We have given those two characters new form as Rojob and Gonesh.”
The play, he added, tells the story of “our own displaced people — their struggles, dreams and history.”
“Theatre is not only a local matter; it is a global language,” Moishan said. “Through it, we wanted to create a new political and aesthetic dialogue before a global audience, blending our own language, the rhythms of the punthi and our history with Shakespeare.”
The premiere begins at 6 pm Birmingham local time.