From what I hear Gulzar is none too happy about his Angoor going into a remake. According to a source very close to the poet-filmmaker, Gulzar Saab feels remakes are the road to ruination of art. Be as it may, producers of the new Angoor, Reliance Entertainment and T-Series have now renamed their project Cirkus (no, that’s not a spelling error) and have declared that their film would be an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Comedy Of Errors.
Remaking Angoor apparently entailed copyright issues. And that’s a laugh. Angoor was certainly not an original (neither were some of Gulzar Saab’s other masterpieces Parichay, Koshish, Mausam). Angoor was actually a remake of Gulzar’s mentor Bimal Roy’s Do Dooni Chaar. And both Angoor and Do Dooni Chaar were adapted from Shakespeare’s A Comedy Of Errors.
While Do Dooni Chaar starred Kishore Kumar and Asit Sen as the two out-of-towners whose twins play havoc with their identity, in Angoor the two sets of double roles were played by Sanjeev Kumar and Deven Varma.
In Cirkus (nee Angoor) Ranveer Singh and Varun Sharma will play the two double roles.
So it’s all about the correct name-calling after all. Shakespeare was wrong when he wondered what was in name. Plenty, it seems.