tales of Suchita

I was introduced to Shakespeare in class eighth by an abridged version of Romeo and Juliet. I knew RJ was supposed to be a love story but after reading the actual story, I remember being unimpressed, thinking what an utter waste of love and life. What was the point – the two died in the end.

My second, more gentle or rather immersive, experience was through Julius Caesar in class ninth where we had to read the entire play in Elizabethan English. That’s where my tryst with literature began. Since then, I have read Caesar and Macbeth in school, studied Hamlet and Othello via an e-course, watched Macbeth and As You Like It performed on stage and you get no points for guessing, Maqbool and Haider are two of my favourite movies.

What intrigued me about If We Were Villains was the cover – a skull and a sword – but what sold me into picking it up was it being based on Shakespeare, and theatre students who live, breathe, recite his words, so much so, they seem to have forgotten where his words end and their life begins.

Is it any surprise, then, that there’s a murder, a falsely accused culprit and a police officer who cannot let the case go because none of it makes sense?

The book follows the life of seven students and there are dialogues in this book that the students say to each other which is not in normal English but verses from Shakespeare!

What was absolutely delightful about the book was it was written as a play – in the sense it has acts and scenes – but it did not just have dialogues. And much like a Shakespearean play, everything seems idyllic in Act I, followed by a murder in Act II and then everything slowly, tragically, but relentlessly falls apart.

The question which kept coming into my head as I raced through this book was the divide between the art and the artist. I have seen a number of interviews of actors where they have spoken about how the physical act of putting on or removing a costume is essential to getting into and out of a character. The train wreck that is the students’ life as shown by M.L. Rio seems inevitable and it made me wonder how truly strange artists are.

Even though Shakespeare wreaked so much havoc on the lives of the students, Oliver, the student who narrates the story, which is more like a confession to the police officer, doesn’t hate Shakespeare. Maybe because Shakespeare, much like any beloved art, is at once a source of pleasure and agony for him. Here are words that absolutely describe how you’re feeling and yet they force you to confront your own darkness.

The tragedy of the story, quite poetically, comes to a head as the students, or rather the players, are performing their last play on their school stage which is King Lear. There’s this dialogue in the book:

But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.

Until the final three-four pages of the Epilogue, you’re not surprised what happens to the six students after the death of the seventh. It is very Shakespearean, to say the least. And as Filipa warns Oliver when he is released from prison, you’re not a tragic hero, you have come to terms with what will happen to Oliver now.

Then, you’re given hope, which completely wrecks you and you want to throw the book away for leaving you breathless and yet, you cannot help but rejoice at that sliver of hope and no one will blame you for holding on.