REINCARNATING MARK TWAIN

Laughter is all we are left with. Nothing can stand against an assault of laughter!” Canadian playwright Gabriel Emanuel imagines Mark Twain concluding during an 1896 talk at the Novelty Theatre in Bombay. To recover from financial losses, the much loved writer of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came to India as part of a global speaking tour. Over a century later, Emanuel has recreated the lecture he might have given in Bombay, though he had no written record to follow. Appropriately, Mark Twain: Live in Bombay! opened last week in the city of its title, though director-actor Vinay Sharma is based in Kolkata.

At the opening at Prithvi Theatre, the audience chuckled through Sharma’s impersonation of the sharp-witted author who, in Emanuel’s imagination, satirises swamis, patriots and racism and offers delightful takes on monkeys, frogs, cats and dogs. After extolling Bombay as “a bewitching place”, he adds, poker-faced, “If it is true that the end of the world is near, I’d rather be in Bombay because everything happens here 10 years later.” More witticisms follow. Christened as Samuel Clemens, the American humorist came up with the pseudonym Mark Twain from the phrase boatmen shouted when they came upon shallow water. “I was always attracted to trouble so I adopted it as my name,” he deadpans. After he was wrongly declared dead, he famously told journalists, “Reports of my death were grossly exaggerated.”

With silver-white hair, a thick bottlebrush moustache and a short-stepped gait, Sharma looks strikingly similar to Twain. Considering there are no audio-visual records, barring a one-minute moving image, how did he bring alive the writer so convincingly? “You find the man. You discard the man. And you discover the performance,” he said.