1648, Agra: marble and murder, a terrible beauty
One of the worst photo-ops of Princess Diana’s collapsing marriage was that shot at the Taj Mahal, billed by romantics as “eternal monument of a husband’s love”. Beautiful it is, ambitiously so. Mughal art is: plenty of it right now at the V& A. But even when you can’t help but marvel (I gasped at the Taj like anybody else) history makes you too aware of its human price. The Mughal Emperors were one of history’s most brutal, vain, murderous and generally dislikeable ruling cadres, Shah Jahan among the worst.
Whether he did indeed have 20,000 skilled labourers be-handed and the architect murdered to prevent his vanity project being imitated – or topped – remains uncertain and semi-legendary. But all too credible, given the godlike status of the dynasty and its casual chopping-down of fellow-creatures . That tale fuels Rajiv Joseph’s strange, gripping, gruesome – and finally philosophically fascinating – 85-minute play. It’s about two Imperial Guards, who we first meet presenting scimitars on an octagonal platform. Its the night before the dawn first breaks on the newly completed Taj. Babur (Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain) is younger, breaking the rules by chatting; Maanuv Thiara’s Humayun is from an army family, stricter but unable to resist identifying the birds whose cries fill he silence of their post on the palace wall. They’re immediately likeable, recognizable, young men at work together in any century: bros.
They discuss the rules – Babur pointing out that the sentence of only three-days prison for blasphemy, while torture and death are the punishment for “sedition” against the ruler, suggests that the latter rates himself above God. Humayun is horrified at such youthful irreverence, even though they’re out of earshot, up on a wall together in the small hours. They shudder at the expected dictat that the 20,000 builders will have their hands chopped off, and the disgustingness of whoever has to do it – 40,000 hands! Babur hopes one day to get the plum job guarding the ruler in the harem, while the elder reprovingly says “It’s not some depraved home of sluts. Just a place the Emperor goes”. They know they must not turn to look at the newly completed wonder in the first dawn of its completion but of course they both do, in a beautiful golden light..
But next time we see them they are blood spattered, with a chopping block, having done the job of hand-chopping. From here – amid their slow but efficient cleaning up of a mass of stage blood – comes much remarkable philosophical reflection, lad-style, about it all. Which somehow, subtly and unpretentiously, sets the mind roving over all hierarchies, all extremes of lowly servitude in every age.
Sometimes there’s horrror at the filth of what they had to do – one cutting, one cauterizing, over and over. Then Babur , after fretting about what will become of the handless men, thinks about the ruler’s reason : to prevent anything as beautiful ever being built again. In shock, he suddenly thinks that by doing that terrible job he has personally ended beauty: since nothing as beautiful can never be built again. It becomes an angry obsession. But Humayun, the older, sterner one with a soft centre, suddenly says birds will always be beautiful. They have talked about their younger job, in the forest, cutting fragrant sandalwood, building a raft. That inspires them for a while . Also inspiring – and very laddish – is their flight into creative conversations about imaginary flights to the stars and whether you could invent a transportable hole and if so whether it would fall through itself…
Final scene: cleaned up, they’ve been promoted to the harem. But Babur throws another curveball, and the terribleness of what such servitude does to human beings – impossible not to think of the Holocaust – returns in a climactic end.
The play will not be to everybody’s taste. But I see why it won prizes – including one for its director here, Adam Karim. Couldn’t take my eyes off it, and it stays with me. Credit to Thiara and Hussain , for Humayun and Babur will stay with me for a long while, speaking for the worker across four centuries .
Orangetreetheatre.co.uk. To 16 nov
Rating four
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