And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  Now, for a change we were being told to ‘throw characterization out of the window’ and perform each action as ourselves, the attempt being to help us understand our own behaviour and reflexes. More importantly, it began to become clear that when you enter a scene, you are coming from somewhere to somewhere else and unless you know where and why in both cases all you will manage is to attempt a ‘great entry’, the very narcissistic trap I had fallen into and made a habit of. Along the way since then I have managed to extricate myself from this pit of self-absorption. We had been taught at NSD how to stand effectively onstage, how to be bang on cue, how to handle costumes, how to catch the light, how to project the voice; how, in short, to make a good picture. We were made to learn the Five Ws (who, why, what, where, when) by rote like the two-times-two table, but no one had been able to emphasize the importance of applying them, much less bothering to explain how they were to be applied.

  What in FTII we were instead being asked to do had the elements of organically incorporating the Five Ws: ‘plan nothing but the intention behind the action’. I had never heard these words at NSD. Prof T went further that day and said, while looking pointedly at me, ‘Some of you have a lot to unlearn.’ The words ‘entry’, ‘exit’, ‘props’, ‘costumes’, ‘settings’, etc. were to be expelled from our vocabulary. Whatever we would perform was to be unplanned (not unthought about though) and, most significantly, as ourselves not as an imaginary character. I was tempted to ask right away what I should do when playing someone different from myself, but desisted from jumping the gun. What had been said so far had made enormous sense and a weak ray of light was peeping through the cracks. I figured I would get some answers in good time.

  Mr Taneja himself, after studying under Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio in New York, had returned to India to take over the acting department when the Institute was founded. He was in every way the absolute antithesis of Alkazi: somewhat rotund, with a head of unruly curly hair, cheerful, unfailingly patient and fully inclined to overlook minor disciplinary infractions. Adored as he was by both the current students and the successful ones who often made the pilgrimage to Pune to pay obeisance, I have no idea how seriously he took himself but having your feet touched on a regular basis by the country’s biggest stars must have some effect on a man’s psyche. Taneja saab seemed to take it all with many grains of salt. He seemed distant initially but with time I grew to love him deeply and feel tremendous gratitude for his concern and for opening my mind to what it is possible to learn as an actor.

  Watching movies in languages other than Hindi or English, from countries other than England or the US explained to me why I found most of the acting in Indian movies so unbearably false. Compared to the level of understanding of life and of their work those Italian, Polish, Czech, Japanese writers and actors seemed to have, our writing and performing were infantile. The kind of acting I was now witnessing was, I realized, what I had always been after. I had no interest any longer in mastering the craft of running around trees or playing larger-than-life characters. I knew that was not my métier anyway, this kind of acting was.

  I began to grapple with figuring out how actors in these mostly European movies could be so watchable and so real at the same time, and found my thoughts veering perilously close to ‘only that which is real is watchable’ which is (not so) obviously untrue, but which took a while to distil into a coherent realization. Laurence Olivier and Toshiro Mifune, for example, are both highly watchable but hardly ‘real’. I thought I could figure out how these two giants did what they did; but how Dustin Hoffman, who I had then seen only in The Graduate, or Per Oscarsson, a little-known but truly great Swedish actor, or Jean-Louis Trintignant, the Frenchman, who were also obviously ‘acting’ could, while doing it, appear so completely without artifice boggled my mind. These actors did not seem to be pretending, they seemed to be the characters they were playing, their poise was so utterly appropriate. HOW DID THEY DO IT?? I knew for certain that this was what I wanted to make myself capable of and I had a hunch that what we were being taught at FTII was a baby step towards that. And I had expected to be taught how to lip-synch to mediocre songs! My excitement, to coin a phrase, knew no bounds. I was going to enjoy learning at last, that was quite enough to dispel the not inconsiderable grief of R’s desertion.

  This elusive word ‘method’ was beginning to reveal itself at last. All the psychotropia available at reasonable prices then also provided a much-needed refuge from reality, pushing me further into the tunnel of beginning to learn what it is an actor actually does when he acts. This was a thought that, incidentally, had long bothered me; why actors could never be articulate about their work, why they almost always resorted to specious befuddlements: ‘acting is nothing but farting about in disguises’, ‘no job for a grown-up’, ‘just the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing’. Or pseudo-mysticisms: ‘I try to find my centre’, ‘I lose myself in the part’, ‘I become the character and everything just follows’, while (actually not) describing what they do and how they do it. This reluctance to pass on anything but tricks of the trade means that the only thing in the possession of such actors is tricks of the trade. If acting is indeed a craft like a carpenter’s, why do most actors find it impossible to explain how in their work, the wood so to say is sawed into the required shapes and the pieces put together to create. AND more important is the purpose of it all simply to play different roles, to grab eyeballs, to display your wares? ‘Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!’ as Sir Laurence reportedly described it once. In that case to what end? The answer is so glaringly simple that most actors do not confront it ever. But trying to figure out what an actor’s role in the scheme of things really is, and trying to understand the dynamics that go into creating a moment of acting truth has been a long, often dark, sometimes blindingly illuminating, sometimes hopeless sojourn, but I am still in the tunnel and it is my spot. This is where I live. The light at the end of the tunnel is reassuring though, and in the past many torches have been lit along the way.

  The term ‘method’ is an Americanism and probably coined in the US by, and as a result of, some of Stanislavsky’s most notable pupils staying on to teach in that country after the historic early-twentieth-century Moscow Art Theatre tour. Stanislavsky himself, it is recorded somewhere, was not an overly gifted actor and therefore it is assumed he felt the need to create or discover for himself a system which did not rely upon cleverness in improvising or an innate ability to entertain, or in ‘seizing the moment’. He wished to uncover a system not dependent on something as indefinable and unpredictable as a ‘good day’ or ‘inborn talent’; a way of approaching acting that was based on accurate human behaviour; a system that would work regardless of audience reaction or of how the actor was feeling that day, one that would point the actor in the right direction, which would be more or less foolproof, a system which could actually be defined and practised.

  In a reaction against the kind of shallow theatricality that was the norm in those days, Stanislavsky emphasized what he called ‘psychological truth’ by which he meant accuracy of behaviour, and finding the route to that behaviour by an empathy with the character’s situation and an understanding of his relation to everything around. It was a fortunate accident for everyone that coinciding with, and complementing, Stanislavsky’s research were the efforts of the playwright Anton Chekhov, who too helped break the mould of the ‘larger than life’ characters peopling the stage then and created dramatic works about the aspirations of the less privileged, the common people. The first conscious practitioners of the Stanislavsky system in cinema were probably American actors, or at least they were the ones with the highest profile, and thus became the best known for it. It also became an excuse for many incompetent actors to justify their shoddy work, and the accusations of the ‘bum scratching, nose picking style of acting’, as it was referred to by many detractors soon after, were not entirely misplaced. The psychologically driven style of acting personifie
d by the early Brando very soon degenerated into as codified a manner of expressing as the older, staid, oratorical style. For evidence of the two vastly differing schools of acting, both then at their zenith, one has only to watch Messrs Brando and Gielgud in the same frame in Joseph Mankiewicz’s film Julius Caesar.

  Film, only a director’s medium?

  The December vacation began and at FTII there was no question of hanging around in the hostel—the celebrated tradition of students staying on as long as they like, often much after completing their courses, started some years later. Jaspal/Shah managed tickets to Delhi, and since I had no desire to meet the folks and was dying to meet up with and show off to old pals at NSD, we stayed on there as guests of Om Puri who in turn was rooming up with a friend (male) he had made in the interim. Bhanu Bharti who had directed the ‘award winning’ production of The Lesson in our final year was readying a production of Hamlet in Hindi with Om playing the title role, and asked me if I would play Claudius. I was on the verge of saying yes when another ex-classmate asked me to act in his production of a new Hindi play called Tilchatta (the cockroach) by the writer of Marjeeva. Even though it was more bizarre and less comprehensible than that one, I said yes. Being produced by the Repertory Company, there were to be ten performances so I asked for a payment of 100 rupees a performance, I was promised 50. I immediately accepted. It was not uncommon for the Repertory to pay actors employed from outside, but apparently when Alkazi later heard of my demand, he was livid. But it was too late, I had made my packet.

  Everything else about Tilchatta, however, sucked in spades. Apart from being an incompetent production, the script was easily one of the most demented pieces of dramatic writing I have ever had the bad fortune to engage with. Equating humans with cockroaches and presenting a dysfunctional marital situation through predictable tableaux, utterly ludicrous character interaction and the kind of moribund dialogue the writer must have heard in his nightmares, it was pure brain-damage. I have only on one other occasion (in a disastrous production of Cyrano at the National Theatre in London some twenty years later) been involved in a play where when it was show time I felt like fleeing, when it was on I hated every second, and when it was over I wanted to cut my throat as soon as possible. My wife Ratna, then still in school, came to see Tilchatta she told me, and still remembers it, but we were at that time very far from knowing each other. Anyway, this production, for whatever it was worth, saw me through the next month and even subsidized my journey back to Pune.

  The instructors in acting at FTII were ex-students who were kept on the payroll through the goodness of Prof T’s heart. These poor bumbling travesties of acting teachers could scarce comprehend what they had been taught, perish the thought of passing anything on. What they did manage to pass off as teaching, while trying very hard and unsuccessfully to assume Taneja’s saab’s air of wisdom, was a small imitation of his jargon. My second stint with yogic excercises, the first having been with an ex-typist-turned- yoga instructor at NSD, proved as disastrous as the first and I became convinced that practising yoga was as useless for me as the ‘playback’ class. I foolishly avoided both these classes through my stay at these respective institutes, not even appearing for my playback exam and getting through because by the time I was due to leave, Taneja saab seemed to have lost all interest in the Institute.

  Jaspal/Shah, both unwashed, always together, both bearded, both perennially stoned, both from the theatre, both unlikely candidates for the Hindi film world, not so strangely in FTII too were treated as the same person right from the start, probably being perceived yet again as one, or at least as identical. I suppose both of us somehow believed it too and kind of enjoyed it. How vastly different we actually were from each other would become apparent over the next two years.

  Ram Gopal Bajaj, an elder from NSD who had befriended us both and who had been extremely supportive and encouraging even when I hadn’t deserved it, first pointed it out to me when during our next short break from FTII, rather than going home, both of us spent the time at Chandigarh where Bajju bhai as he was known was heading the University Theatre department. In the month we stayed there Bajju bhai directed us in Ajaatghar, a two-hander written by Rameshwar Prem, and it was the cause of many heated arguments. Bajju bhai, being strictly old school, emphasized the importance of diction and clarity while emoting, and we were determined to thoroughly indulge in our rudimentary understanding of the ‘method’. The play was performed, not without success, in Chandigarh and later in Delhi.

  During Ajaatghar Bajju bhai expressed to me his concerns about Jaspal. We were not at all the same kind of person, he felt, and he was not at all sure this friendship would last; in fact he confessed it might be dangerous for me, I should try and go my way and let him go his. I was convinced he was talking nonsense then but in the light of what happened three years later, I have to believe that either Bajju bhai was clairvoyant or he had an incisive understanding of people. It was in the second year at FTII that the separation of personalities, and perceptions, began to take place. I moved into a single room, a perk for having stood first in the class here. A distance began to develop though we still smoked together all the time; and instead of eating, frequently endangered our health and our sanity with huge doses of Dexedrine to trip and then Mandrax to sleep. I should have detected the first sign of trouble when Jaspal said to me with just the hint of a grimace, ‘Arre! WE came first yaar!’ but I took it to be an affirmation of undying friendship.

  So taken was I with what I was learning at FTII that I had prevailed upon Om, who was then in the NSD Rep, to come there as well, which he had; and after undergoing the humiliating rituals that are every newcomer’s lot to endure, had settled down not very happily. He was dissatisfied and seemed uninterested in what had so greatly excited me. Not so strange, considering that Prof T’s participation in the department was now minimal and the students were now completely at the mercy of the instructors. Om’s second year, in fact, coincided with the strike and cessation of all work for practically the entire second half of that term.

  The students of direction were entrusted with making, in their first year, a silent 5-minute film as an exercise in continuity, and then a 10-minute film with dialogue; in their second year a mise en scene and an ad film; and in their final year a song, a documentary and a 40-minute feature known as the ‘diploma’ film. Though acting students, and invariably the same ones, were mostly cast in these exercises, it was the diploma films which were naturally considered most important by all students as a show-reel to get work in the industry, and acting students were not necessarily cast in those. And that is where all the trouble started.

  It was being whispered that the acting course was to close down and Prof T was involved in setting up an institute of his own in Bombay, so he was seldom present through our closing few months, also managing to be diplomatically absent when we the students of acting were with extreme fervour pressing our demands to be included in the student diploma films— an event that forced the Institute into temporary limbo and hastened the closure of the acting course.

  It is not unlikely that my blood pressure will begin to climb when I recount the incidents which led among other things to a hunger strike, which completed the isolation of the student actors, made the chasm between them and those of other courses unbridgeable, created lasting animosities, and a heartburn that hasn’t yet subsided. Arguments on integrity or lack of it were traded, all actors were bunched together into one generic group, a group that was in some way ‘special’ but not special enough to warrant inclusion in student projects. Whereas a cameraman or editor or recordist could not be recruited from outside the student body, the student directors were permitted free rein in their choice of actors— they could cast anyone they liked, acting student or not. There were actually students of acting who went through their two years without once facing a camera. When we made the first noises of dissatisfaction about this, the not even half-truthful justification about the age limitation o
f the acting students (most between eighteen and twenty-five) was trotted out to justify the student directors ignoring the acting department as material for their films. I encountered not for the only time the vanity of film-makers who refuse to acknowledge actors as an essential component of film-making and regard them only as a necessary evil to be put up with.

  Preparations for making that year’s diploma films had begun and teams were being assembled. Some actors, myself included, received more than one offer, while some didn’t get any at all. Those who didn’t had also been through the two- year course and we were all equally untested, so it was not a matter of confirmed capability. This judgemental behaviour of the direction students—ignoring actors whose prerogative it was to be included in the diploma films—was quite insufferable, as was the fact that outside actors were often cast for absolutely no reason but the flimsy ‘my conception’ and ‘perfect casting’ argument. That many of the worthies who as students were resolute on demanding complete freedom in casting the characters as they had ‘conceived’ them, and refused to ‘be dictated to by bloody actors’ later went on to willingly genuflect to the star system in the real tinsel world as far as casting goes, is another story.