A marvellous 400th tribute to William Shakespeare

India International Centre celebrated William Shakespeare’s 400th death anniversary with a programme entitled Shakespeare 400. They had two films during the daytime to showcase to the audience, Much a do about nothing and Richard III. In the evening, they presented Shakespeare’s songs and sonnets. The evening began with Justin McCarthy playing a Harpsichord solo followed by an introduction to the program by Shormishtha Panja. Introduction to the music was presented by Sunit Tondon who gave us this piece of knowledge that the music was all original, taken from the time of Shakespeare. Though there are many contemporary musical versions of the sonnets, the company decided to go back to the original scores.

Thomas Morley and Robert Johnson were well known composers of the time. There were also songs from Shakespeare’s plays, “It was a lover and his lass” from As you like it, The poor soul sat sighing, A willow song from Othello and a song from The Tempest, Full fathom five. The readings by Sunit Tondon, Sabina Jaitly and Anhad Anand were very effective and as was Justin McCarthy’s Harpsichord and the singing by Prabhat Chandola and Sunanda Rao Erdem.

Surgical Strike, a stand-up act by Sanjay Rajaura was a direct attack at the present government and its lack of will to change the system. He was acidic in his comments and truly portrayed the disgust with the system with mighty blows. He spoke in Hindi and English and appeared to be a good actor. He let things slide a bit when he compared the recent American elections with our last general elections. He said that by electing Donald Trump, the people of US have made a big blunder, same as we did. He does not take the name of our Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, but he is present in his innuendos.