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B. Suresha, adapting Ibsen’s
play, The Master Builder into Kannada (Balura Gudikara), explains, In
order to adapt the play I had to first translate the original play
entirely, as this play had not been translated previously into
Kannada. Therefore a literal translation was prepared first. After
that I had to decide on the format we wanted to create. This was a
bigger challenge.
It had been decided that this play would be directed by B. Jayashree,
the well known director of Kannada theatre. Therefore it was
inevitable that this play of Ibsen had to have elements of
professional theatre as well as the folk elements in its adopted
version. We chose the Veera Ghaase folk format. In Veera Ghaase, we
have ‘Veerabhadra’s who dance holding sword in their hands. These
people are followers of lord Shiva. It is said in folklore that when
Daksha humiliated Lord Shiva, the Veerabhadras made their incarnation
on this earth and killed him. We decided that it would be better to
use these Veerbhadras directly and characterize Ibsen’s Master builder
through them.
Ibsen’s master builder is a wordy play. Here clashes and explosions
appear through words only. There is an experiment of unveiling the
history and character of the characters through words. Apart from
this, Ibsen’s plays demand realistic theatre. This is difficult in
contemporary Kannada theatre. Therefore it was inevitable to stylize
Ibsen’s play while adapting it to Kannada. For this reason we had to
convert some of the details appearing through word to action. To
overcome the limitation of time and location constraints we decided to
take the help of the Veeraghaase. This group indicates the progress of
the scenes and takes the story forward.
After this it was decided to use only one character to act as counter
voice of Master builder as well as Veerabhadras and therefore thought
of using the character ‘Hilda Wangel’ in the original play as the
hero’s shadow and questioning mentailty. WSince we were using the
Veeraghaase form, it was impossible to make the play contemporary. We
therefore we took Ibsen’s play to the 14th century.
During that time many Kings of Karnataka had built temples . The hero
of this play, is one such ‘gudikara’ (temple builder). If the
atrocities committed by the gudikara are introduced in the first
scene, the character ‘Thara’ (Hilda wangle) which appears in the
subsequent scenes, directly causes the Gudikara’s death by removing
his Ego and inspiring him to climb the tower by himself. This way it
was decided to use Thara to counteract the plays Hero as well as the
Veerabhadras.
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