As a child, Muhammad Ali Baig was convinced he would never follow in the footsteps of his father, the legendary thespian Qadir Ali Baig. He found theatre too intense. Then there was the inevitable disappointment—months of rehearsals, costume designing, stitching and set building would all go in a few shows. To young Muhammad, it seemed a waste of time and effort. So, after his studies, he went into ad filmmaking, directing over 450 ad films and social documentaries in seven countries in less than a decade. It did not satisfy, though. It was on his father’s 20th death anniversary, when he heard from some of the top Indian theatre personalities about the high regard in which they held his father, that he realised he had a responsibility to safeguard Qadir’s legacy. That was his initiation into theatre. He founded the Qadir Ali Baig Theatre Foundation and the Qadir Ali Baig Theatre Festival in Hyderabad in 2005.
“When we started, it was a five-day festival,” says Muhammad. “Everyone said that to get audiences to come watch one play in Hyderabad would be a task, how do you expect them to come five days in a row? But they did, and what started 20 years ago as a son’s tribute has now become a city’s festival.” He says it is extremely fulfilling to bring to life his father’s vision of a vibrant theatre scene in the city. With theatre groups, local productions and venues mushrooming, and audiences growing manifold, the Qadir Ali Baig festival has revived theatre in Hyderabad.
In its 20th edition, the festival has a unique theme: ‘Stalwarts to Next-Gen.’ “We have presented the best of theatre for the last 20 years,” says Muhammad. “Now it should move to the next-gen, because there is a promising crop of actors, writers, directors and designers that is coming up. These are the people who will take theatre forward.”
In the west, being a ‘theatre kid’ had a negative connotation, typifying an actor who was given to excessive showmanship. In 2013, for example, when Anne Hathaway had delivered an Oscar-winning performance as Fantine in Les Miserables, a critic told Hollywood.com that she was just a “theatre kid whose enthusiasm and earnestness was never reined in, and now she has an international stage from which to project her diaphragm.” In India, however, the theatre kids are proud of the appellation; they own it and flaunt it. One of them, Zahan Kapoor, the grandson of Shashi Kapoor who built Prithvi Theatre in Juhu in 1978, says his favourite childhood memory is of listening to Zakir Hussain performing at Prithvi. For almost 40 years, he performed annually at a memorial concert in honour of Zahan’s grandmother Jennifer Kendal. “It was one of the most beautiful things I had heard,” he says. “There was, of course, his mastery over music, but there was also genuine friendship and love for Prithvi.” The two plays that influenced him greatly as a child, and which he has watched repeatedly, are Ramu Ramanathan’s The Boy Who Stopped Smiling and Rajat Kapoor’s C for Clowns.
Just like Muhammad, these theatre kids are committed to taking forward the legacy of their parents and grandparents. “I have a powerhouse of a mother,” says Ira Dubey, the daughter of actor and theatre director Lillete Dubey, who founded the PrimeTime Theatre Company in 1991. Ira’s grandfather was a scientist and her grandmother a doctor, so she understands what a maverick step it was for her mother to move to the arts and start a theatre company. “Theatre was not considered a lucrative profession and she had no guarantee that she could support herself,” says Ira. “It must have been a very tough decision for her. Growing up seeing her do it all—producing, directing, acting and building this company—was hugely inspiring. I learned a lot.”
She says as she gets older, she appreciates her mother more. “Ten years ago, when I was still living with her, we would have been driving each other nuts,” she laughs. “But today, we have come to understand and respect each other. In the rehearsal room, she would be directing me as an actor, but when we get in the car, it would be like, ‘Mom, I need to go for this blood test tomorrow’. Immediately, the relationship shifts. I am very grateful for this dynamic between us.”
It is the same for Junaid, son of actor Aamir Khan. “My first play was with Arundhati Nag in Mother Courage and Her Children,” he says. “Apparently, my dad used to do backstage work for her play. He told me how he had always wanted to act with her and now I had got the opportunity.” Junaid says Aamir has come to watch most of his plays and that he has never been critical of his performance. “He has liked most of the things I have done,” he says. “He’s only critical with his own work. Otherwise, he is very easy to impress. My mother, on the other hand, is more difficult to impress.”
In 1962, the famous thespian Habib Tanvir had bemoaned the state of theatre in India, with a shortage of playwrights who could hold the interest of the audience. When not reviving the classical drama through productions “dead as mutton”, theatre workers follow “the worst sort of naturalistic styles... inspired by films or borrowed mechanically from the west,” he said. The playwrights of the country sat up and took notice. As though in vengeance, they wrote some of the best plays the country has witnessed in the late 1960s and 1970s—Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi, Mohan Rakesh in Hindi and Girish Karnad in Kannada, among many others. Most of these plays were translated into many languages and performed across the country. After that, there was a lull. And now, there is a resurgence of young playwrights like Aditya Rawal and Faezeh Jalali, whose plays will be staged at the Qadir Ali Baig festival, who are experimenting with form and content and coming out with cutting-edge productions that address contemporary themes of displacement, identity, social justice, gender and climate change.
Faezeh’s Runaway Brides, for example, is a farce about the chaos that ensues when two mothers elope before a wedding. “It is a fun play with 13 actors and three musicians onstage throughout,” says Junaid, who stars in it. “Faezeh really likes her high comedies. It is very heavy on timing and physical comedy, which is not something you get to do much on-screen.” Aditya’s Siachen, starring Zahan, is a more sombre take on three soldiers stranded on the world’s highest and coldest battlefield.
What distinguishes the theatre kids of today is how much they love theatre. They all have solid acting pedigree and with the inherent advantage their background offers them, one might think that they would be committed to pursuing stardom on-screen. In a movie-mad country, the comparative fame that theatre offers is negligible. Yet, they say they’ll never give it up, because it offers them a connect with the audience that cinema never can. That, according to them, is the beauty of a collective experience like theatre, a respite from the digital age we live in.
Zahan says that 10 years ago, he was worried he would get bored with theatre, of doing the same play again and again. Today, his perspective has changed. It is more than two years since he started doing Siachen. “I can’t describe how fulfilling it is to revisit the same text repeatedly. To allow time to pass, evolve as a human, constantly deepen your understanding of a single text and realise that there is an infinity of nuances, of human complexity there.”