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Priyanka Bhadani
Priyanka Bhadani

THEATRE

Naseeruddin Shah's ambitious 'The Father' to have a month's run in September

naseeruddhin-shah-father Actor Naseeruddin Shah

In a conversation with THE WEEK last year, ahead of the staging of Dear Liar, Naseeruddin Shah and wife Ratna Pathak Shah had rued about the sad state of theatre in India—how some Gujarati plays were cringeworthy and how there was a lot of emphasis of the set design even when the plays would have been effective in a minimalist way. Shah had then said that with his theatre company—Motley—he was trying to create better productions, in whatever little way possible.

With his upcoming production, The Father, he seems to be doing just that—taking the theatre scene in India a notch higher. Motley is trying to create a culture of theatre by doing continuous runs of a play. Unlike the West, we don't have shows akin to Broadway, which have time and again set records for being the longest running.

The Father, originally written by Florian Zeller in French, is the story of an elderly man with dementia and his daughter, who is trying to care for him while balancing her own life and challenges. A translation by Christopher Hampton, the play, first commissioned by the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath, and was first presented on October 16 2014.

In a note announcing the play, Shah writes, “Ever since my dreams of becoming a professional actor crystallised, and even before that happened, I had read that plays in the West sometimes ran for years. It seemed too good to be true that the actors in these plays trod the boards every single night! As an adolescent dreamer, unaware that play-going is not a habit in India as it in the West, I fantasised often about doing the same. There wasn’t and still isn’t another activity in the world I’d give up everything for. Then came the hard brush with the realisation that we, in India, don’t have that kind of theatre; on an average most companies here perform once or twice a month. While all this is definitely a challenge that prepares us for eventualities and keeps us on our toes, it is a task that, though keeping our work fluid, certainly detracts from our getting to engage with and elevate the text in the course of performance. Most amateur productions just do not get that kind of time."

Even earlier, he had emphasised on how the understanding of a play and its characters become better with every passing performance. While talking about Dear Liar that dramatises the letters exchanged between Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and English stage actress Patrick Campbell, a play which the couple has performed over more than two decades, he had told us in 2016, “It has been like living with it and growing with it. Since the action of the play covers about 40 years and we have been engaging with this play, not performing it but preparing it, reading it and trying to understand it for almost 20-25 years now, we have almost grown with the characters. I think just as our understanding of life has grown, our understanding of this script has grown. If it hadn’t, we would be doing a pretty bad show.”

In the note, he further writes, "at the risk of sounding like a litany of complaints, it has to be said that Indian theatre companies not backed by corporate funds are faced with huge odds when producing their work. Rehearsal spaces are not inexpensive, actors are constantly being wooed away by TV or cinema jobs, theatres have to be booked way in advance and often entail huge losses when productions don’t work—something no company can afford. Stage hands and actors alike are invariably paid a pittance, totally at odds with the amount of work they do. But such is the nature of the beast. Motley, along with many other brother companies, has by now weathered these conditions and perfected this art of fly-by-night theatre,” he adds.

He says that the little voice inside him has urged him to do a continuous run of a play. And it is something that cannot be ignored any longer. “It has to be silenced,” he says. And thus, with his theatre group, Motley, he has embarked on its new play The Father that will open at the Experimental Theatre on September 1 and will be performed every night through that month, followed by similar runs at other venues.

“Apart from giving the whole company a taste of what professional theatre involves, this experiment will allow everyone to really chew upon the play intensely for the period of a month and, optimistically thinking, help the actors arrive at a stage where the words they speak and the parts they play become their own. Secondly, the emotional demands this play makes cannot be summoned up by the actors for an occasional show or two. This is not to be confused with the nonsense about actors 'becoming their parts' but to just keep them sharply focused through the period of performance,” he says.

Shah is aware that the month may prove utterly exhausting for everyone concerned including, perhaps, the audience, but he is willing to take the risk. “Not because I am confident of packing the theatre every night, but because I am convinced the experiment will reap its rewards in the sense of all participants realising the value of pulling together for an extended time and getting to the shore, so to say, guided by the experience of being continually observed by an audience, which is something, I reiterate, stage actors in India seldom get the opportunity to do,” he concludes.

Something similar is difficult to recall. We have had longer running shows like the recent production Mughal-e-Azam. But they ran for a stretch of 10 days max and came back to the stage after a break.

The Father, directed by Naseerudin Shah and co-directed by Ratna Pathak Shah, stars the former as the father. The other cast members include Pathak-Shah, Heeba Shah, Sayan Mukherjee, Saahil Vaid, Bhavna Pani, Aahana Kumra, Neeraj Kabi, Faisal Rashid, Trishla Patel, Prerna Chawla and Jaya Virrley.

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