Embodying Narratives of Altered Protagonists: A Reading of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Adapted by Tanika Gupta

Abstract

The need to revisit Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations in an adaptation as a play by Tanika Gupta serves as a renewal of the classic story that signifies the depiction of complex human relationships and its accompanying emotional turmoils. The play in its artistic capacity effectuates a profound rendition, proving to be a workmanship whittled in the fine art of storytelling. It is a story that is redrawn and retold in a compelling tale of love andsearch for identity and its accompanying erasures as its major leitmotif. The plot of the play foregrounds individual tales that we encounter in the consequence of colonial history. In the play, Pip’s centrality as a protagonist, is of someone whose journey of life is mired in the upheavals of love and poverty. Though his decision towards a realisation to become “a gentleman”, in terms of acquiring ‘mannerisms ‘like that of the English, appears to be life changing. However, for Pip, the act of ‘becoming’is a self-defeating act and a decision that has tragic ramifications. The paper focusses on the idea of literary texts and their parallel adaptive coherence that gives impetus to the origination of qualitative ideas as art forms that find a natural embrace with each other. The adaptation also seeks to embody a certain theatrical origination by way of putting the novel within the scope of a vibrant discourse of life’s meanings through stage space. Texts finding a mutual correspondence, is in a way directed to dilate progressive ideas through the stage, is bestexemplified through Tanika Gupta’s adroitness as a playwright.