Scene: A military trial in a court room.
Accused: Lt Stephen Maryk of the naval reserve.
Charge: Mutiny.
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial has been performed several times in the last fifty-odd years, and not always successfully. Its last revival was a Broadway production in 2006 at New York’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theater that received mixed reviews. Written by the Jewish-American writer Herman Wouk, the play drew from The Caine Mutiny, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel written by Wouk in 1951. Three years later, the novel was also made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart. Wouk went on to write a couple of other novels based on World War II, but The Caine Mutiny was the closest to his own experiences in the American navy, onboard a fighter-minesweeper. Written in the years following the war, the play was appreciated for exploring unidentified tensions within the hierarchical ranks of the military.
Most recently, the play was staged on 9 January in Delhi by Naseeruddin Shah’s Motley Productions as a part of the 12th Bharat Rang Mahotsav, the annual theatre festival organised by the National School of Drama. It narrates the trial of Lt Stephen Maryk, an officer in the American navy during World War II, on charges of mutiny. His act of insubordination as the second-in-command on an American navy minesweeper, the USS Caine, is the relieving of his Commanding Officer and taking charge when the ship encounters a typhoon on 18 December 1944.
The Commanding Officer is Lt Com Philip Francis Queeg, a navy veteran, whose authoritative decisions on the ship make him unpopular among his junior officers. This aversion is reinforced by a series of incidents involving a seemingly futile search for missing strawberries on the ship. Also controversial is the anecdote about his dropping a yellow dye marker in the sea after the Caine cuts its own towline and leaves behind boats during a military exercise, leading to the captain being nicknamed Old Yellow Stain. So during the trial, when defence lawyer Greenwald asks Lt Willis Keith, one of the junior officers on board the Caine, “What did the yellow stain symbolise?” Keith replies unhesitatingly, “Cowardice.” The same incidents also have the junior officers suspect Queeg of being mentally ill, a speculation that culminates in his dismissal on the night of the typhoon. The trial brings forth a series of witnesses, including two naval psychiatrists, a destroyer-minesweeper expert, Queeg’s junior officers such as Lt Keith, Thomas Keefer, and Maryk and Queeg themselves.
As a court trial with high drama, the play has the potential to involve the audience in the legal procedure of judging the guilty and the innocent. What keeps the play riveting is some finely nuanced acting that does not veer towards either histrionics or the stiff monotony that can creep into a military trial. While the long-winded technical details become a little hard to follow, what sustains the viewers’ interest is a compact script and witty dialogue. As the narrative weaves itself around the changing notion of truth, each scene and each witness opens up a fresh dimension to the case, adding layers of moral ambiguity to the original question: Was Maryk justified in deposing his captain on the charge of his being mentally ill during the typhoon?
“For us, the play’s relevance is not just limited to the Second World War, but people stuck in a traumatic situation. It is a way of exploring the nature of authority: how do people relate to each other? What are the lines of communication?” says Ratna Pathak Shah, one of the visible faces of Motley, who also did the lighting of the play.
Yet as the play progresses, the truth that is being probed begins to resemble the blurry form of a palimpsest. The first scene, a meeting between Maryk, his fellow officers Keith and Keefer, and Maryk’s prospective lawyer Lt Barney Greenwald, establishes the contours of the characters’ places in the plot. “I’d rather be prosecuting you than defending you,” Greenwald tells Maryk soon after, and the reasons for his ambivalence are unveiled over the course of the play. “The navy is a masterblind designed by geniuses for execution by idiots,” a despairing Maryk quotes his fellow officer Keefer soon after.
Keefer is a writer in civilian life, whose amateur psychoanalysis plays a significant part in influencing Maryk’s diagnosis of Queeg’s insanity. Yet when the same Keefer refuses to acknowledge his role in relieving Queeg, Greenwald refuses to probe Keefer further, telling Maryk that he has a greater chance of winning the case with one hero instead of two disgruntled officers.
Wouk’s play makes a mockery of the psychiatrists, Dr Forrest Lundeen and Dr Allen Bird, who have given a clean chit to Queeg for the state of his mental wellbeing. During the testimony, they seem confused and unwittingly affirm Greenwald’s charges of insanity against Queeg.
Motley Productions had first performed this play in 1990, and revived it last year. “We chose the play because it offered us 16 great parts as performers and has rich possibilities for young actors,” Ratna Pathak Shah explains. But the play belongs to Kenith Desai, a seasoned theatre performer who has worked in Motley productions such as Waiting for Godot and A Romance for Ruby. As Greenwald, he breathes life into the character of the defence lawyer, whose almost continuous presence on the stage enhances the lingering contradictions about the concepts of truth, insanity, duty and betrayal in the play. At times, he looks uncomfortable at having to prosecute a man he would rather not, and at other times, menacing—grilling the witnesses who are produced to testify during the trial. With astute cross-questioning, the witnesses often end up contradicting their own statements. Greenwald fights the case because of the need to defend the wrong man put on trial. His inner conflict comes up in his conversations with Maryk:
Greenwald: Who’s the real victim in this courtroom, you or Commander Queeg?
Maryk: Commander Queeg was nuts!
Greenwald: You heard Dr. Lundeen. It’s a matter
of degree.
We know the reason only in the end. In the short climax, at a party held to celebrate the success of Keefer’s novel, Greenwald explains his actions in a fiery speech, holding Keefer responsible for Queeg’s downfall. As a Jew, he sees Queeg’s contribution in defending the country from the Nazis.
The rest of the cast are young actors from the National School of Drama and Whistling Woods International, who have worked with Motley in various productions over the years. Ankur Vikal turns in a fine-drawn performance as the quirky Queeg. The transformation of the captain’s casual and lighthearted demeanour to anger, frustration and confusion is skilfully portrayed not only through dialogue but also body language. Initially, Queeg dismisses the questions being raised about his mental illness with a laugh. However, under relentless questioning by Greenwald in the second half of the play, Queeg is quickly reduced to playing the paranoid figure described by his junior officers. As he messes up his statements and scrambles for white lies to cover up, he looks both angry and confused at the same time. Almost imperceptibly, his tension is expressed through the clenching of small steel balls in his hand, the symbols of his obsession with perfection and control.
Shashank Kaithan is convincing as the no-nonsense officer Maryk, a fisherman’s son, who sincerely believes that he has been right in deposing Queeg and taking the responsibility of steering the Caine out of the typhoon. The portrayal of Keefer’s character, however, is disappointing, his arrogance coming across as weak and forced instead of the suave superciliousness of a man driven by the belief in his intellect. The wily, conniving aspect of Keefer’s nature is reduced to a pompous caricature.
As a courtroom drama, The Caine Mutiny does not allow much room for visual experimentation and display. The mise-en-scene is simple, yet makes effective use of the stage space. For instance, the seating of the jury who face the witnesses instead of the audience, in the orchestra pit at the front of the stage, works in two ways. It serves as a metaphor for the legal system, while also drawing the attention of the audience towards the witnesses seated in the centre, with the prosecution and the defendant benches laid out on either side of it. The lighting plays with these spaces, shifting from the jury to the witnesses, and on to the conversations between Maryk and Greenwald. This switch from one theatre of action to another becomes the most effective during the scene of Queeg’s collapse, with the spotlight focused on him. As he backs out, dejected, the military-style music played in between scenes blares out, adding to the poignancy of his breakdown. And, finally, that this 130-minute court drama keeps the audience on the edge of their seats says a lot about the expert direction by the versatile Naseeruddin Shah.
In the finale, as the angle of Greenwald’s Jewish identity materialises in his argument in defence of Queeg, it adds another dimension to the layers of meaning about truth in the play. However, as a larger moral argument for the immunity of the armed forces from questioning by civilians, the final scene sends across a message that seems alienating and redundant. Despite this dampener, the performances keep up the drama of the court martial, making it possible to see the play as a metaphor for life.