And Then One Day: A Memoir

by Shah, Naseeruddin

  Poor theatre, moneyed film

  When Motley was formed, Benjamin and I, its nucleus, both had a wish list of plays we would have loved to do, but didn’t have the resources to attempt, so starting small, we staged a series of two-handers in English after Godot had fallen into place. Not into the kind of bedroom farces always so popular in Bombay, we wanted to include only the few people we knew well, who we enjoyed being with and who shared our love for theatre. Tom Alter, Kenny Desai, Aakash Khurana and of course Ratna when she ended her NSD course gradually began to form the core of the company. Like every other actor in the world, I too had often fantasized about playing Hamlet but suspected that mounting it was beyond me.

  I often dreamt of grand glittering productions Alkazi could be proud of, but on the other hand there was Dubeyji’s example. Having directed many of the same plays Alkazi had, Dubeyji demonstrated that being hamstrung financially was no impediment; his productions could be as effective, if not more so, than the Old Man’s. With no resources and no agenda, political or otherwise, we had nothing to ‘say’; we were in the theatre only because of an unreasonable love for it. After some confusion as to the direction Motley should take, and not having access to even a thousandth of the kind of funding NSD received, I had to abandon my dreams of attempting an ‘Alkazi’ and settled for working with what we had, and Dubey’s route seemed the one to take. In any case I had been unable to hit upon a solitary insight that would make Hamlet say more than it already has over the centuries—portions of it baffle me still. I wished, quite simply, to do it only in order to play Hamlet and that didn’t seem a good enough reason. This is a thought that over the years has grown and hardened into an unshakeable conviction and has in a way contributed to my being able finally to arrive at a somewhat satisfactory equation theatre-wise.

  Motley didn’t do much initially. The corporates had yet to make serious theatre fashionable and every show we attempted on our own put us further in the red. Of the plays I really wanted to do, there weren’t many that wouldn’t be merely exercises in vanity, so I thought I’d just be patient until a director who wished to do any of these saw in me the potential to play Macbeth or Lear. No one did, but I am pleased to report that getting to play neither did not devastate me because I was beginning to feel I might be on the verge of discovering a reason for doing theatre, other than to strut on the stage and lap up the applause. I felt I owed something more to theatre than tired re-enactments of well-known dramas or popular comedies. At one point, before my ideas had had time to germinate, and fed up of not being able to produce the kind of classy stuff I wanted to, I decided Motley would make some money by going popular with Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, but the audience stayed away in droves. Benjamin then attempted Shaw’s Arms and the Man and both met the fate of many an early Motley production—closure after a dozen or so poorly attended shows. The headache of organizing and dealing with the real props in The Odd Couple made me resolve never ever again to try anything naturalistic onstage; and doing the Shaw play made it clear that one should never attempt his work unless the actors’ tongue muscles are flexible enough to handle the musical notes his dialogue demands.

  Jerzy Grotowski’s concept of a theatre sans illusion began to make a little more sense: after all the audience never forgets they are in a theatre; they only need to glance away from your face to see the lights and the curtains. Attempting to convince them that what they are seeing is actually happening is futile and according to Brecht, undesirable; they must in fact be reminded that they are witnessing an enactment. This contention too began to seem extremely valid, but we plodded along for a while, doing other short pieces by Beckett, Pinter, Chekhov.

  I next played Oedipus for another company in a production that received much acclaim and I witnessed for the first time at Prithvi a queue for tickets extending almost into the street. I have no idea what it was that so attracted audiences to this show—my presence could hardly have been the cause, else there should have been such a response for every play I appeared in and that was certainly not the case. I lost my voice on the fourth or fifth day of the run and the production was just this side of competent, but people who saw it were going away delirious. I guess the idea of a guy marrying his own mother is a tad titillating, and certainly Oedipus Rex is one of the most cracking whodunits ever written. Logistics problems made the play close after two stints of ten shows each, but in the course of it Ratna and I made friends we have stayed close to.

  An earlier attempt at reading Jerzy Grotowski’s book Towards a Poor Theatre at NSD had not worked, but finding it staring at me accusingly in the face in a bookshop one day, I glanced through the Foreword in which he argues that poverty of resources should be theatre’s strength not its weakness, and decided to give it another crack. Profoundly influenced by Kathakali and the Balinese Mask Dance, and disillusioned by all Western theatre which, he felt, was at that time moving in the wrong direction (and incidentally still is) by becoming more and more illusory and technical, in fact attempting to create the hallucinatory quality of cinema—something which goes against its very nature—he originated the concept of a theatre comprising only the absolutely essential elements: actors and a text. Eliminating everything extraneous, decorative or suggestive, he zeroed in on the actor as the central tool of communication. There were no sets, actors performed on a bare stage wearing only bare minimum clothing, and he often even replaced the text with what he called ‘primal sounds’. Ritualistic/religious connotations were evoked, the performance space was ‘hallowed’, the terms ‘state of grace’, ‘holy Actor’, ‘exchange of energies between Actor and Audience’ were used. All this, apart from sounding pretty far out and well-nigh impossible to attain seemed also to demand an exceptional degree of commitment and physical skill, neither of which I suspected I had. Then in a passage on actor-training, I came upon the statement that created a paradigm shift in my ideas on learning how to act. His intention was not ‘to burden the Actor with skills, the skills must be taken for granted’; what he said he tried to do was ‘rid the Actor of everything that prevents him from being himself’. I don’t think the problem of learning acting has ever been put so succinctly, I knew that this training was what I needed if I wished to grow. There was no one around me who would even understand what I was talking about, let alone help with it; and I had a suspicion that neither the kind of ‘popular’ movies that were now coming my way nor the so- called serious cinema being made here would do it.

  As if to vindicate this feeling I then got offered in quick succession a mixed bag of both kinds of films, some enjoyable but all in various ways somewhat unsatisfying: Saza-e-Maut (also called ‘Saza-e-Mouth’), Katha, Chakra, Hum Paanch, Bezubaan, Woh Saat Din, Bazaar, Holi and Aadharshila— in which I had to be respectively put-upon hero, lovable loser, lecherous street thug, buddy of the hero, smooth blackmailer, dutiful husband, alcoholic poet, upright professor and passionate film-maker. It was almost as if nature had benevolently decided to give me more time to decide which kind was my cup of tea, and also to ensure that I make some money. While the first and last three named films (until I saw them, that is) were the result of wishing desperately to be involved in the new kind of cinema, the others provided the bacon, so to say. And somewhere along the way between the lot of them, I moved at last from a rented apartment to one I owned. Miss Mary was proving too much trouble to maintain so I had to flog her and bought myself a Royal Enfield, my resources having exhausted themselves buying myself a home in Sherly Village, which then was actually a village with little thatched cottages, paddy fields and a profusion ofcoconut trees. Only the occasional high-rise had disturbed the equanimity of the place but all of it still had the wonderful laid-back energy that pervades the air in a coastal town. When Ratna and I married, it was the first home we made together.

  Then one day in 1981 the playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar who knew of my desire to study under Grotowski called to tell me that the man himself was in town and would I like to meet him? Assur
ing me he wasn’t in jest, Mahesh gave me the address I should go to—Rekha Sabnis’s house, in fact, which I happened to know. I wasn’t sure what Grotowski looked like, I had seen only one photograph of him, looking somewhat robust, black-suited, hair short, eyes hidden behind dark glasses. It was obviously an old picture: he was now reed thin with a straggly beard and matted hair; dark glasses, however, were firmly in place. Barefoot, wearing a crumpled kurta, dirty jeans he smoked bidis incessantly; and well into the evening though it was, he seemed to have just awoken. He asked a few questions about why I wanted to come to Poland, I told him that his book and what I knew of his work had opened a few windows for me and I wished to undergo the training he could provide. In reply he said ‘the window opens inward, not outward’. Seeing I wasn’t too sure what he meant, he spoke in plain language: ‘It all might not turn out as you expect.’ I assured him I was prepared for anything, which in retrospect became an idle boast when I actually got there.

  I did not know that Grotowski’s theatre ideas and practice had grown radically since he wrote that book. He had in fact abandoned performance altogether. Theatre in any case had been analogous to life for him and he had now decided to dispense with an audience as well, and was involved in a search for what he termed ‘the Primal State’. ‘One Actor, one Audience with the roles interchangeable’ had now become ‘Actor and Audience are one’.

  The next day I received a note informing me I had been selected to participate in the ‘Theatre of Sources’ workshop to be conducted in Wroclaw where his Institute for Research into Acting was situated. The earnings from some of the above- mentioned movies helped me secure a ticket on Swissair to Warsaw via Vienna and I got ready to travel overseas for the first time. I was able to withdraw with some difficulty from one film I had taken on, was unable to withdraw from the other—I was unable to repay the money they had already given, having spent it on my ticket, and to trusty Taher’s complete incomprehension I told him I was going to a country he had never heard of. As far as he could see I was getting plenty of work and I was taking a chance with my career, but the fact was my acting abilities had come to a standstill, I was actually finding myself tiring of the whole business and had begun to fear that this was the mediocrity I was condemned to for the rest of my life. With no guidance, I was not growing. I was finding neither the commercial nor the art-house fare stimulating, I wasn’t getting the popular films I’d have liked to do and many of the serious types had already been shown up as money-grabbing idea appropriators who kept making the same film over and over, and not too well at that—a situation which didn’t seem to be heading to a resolution I liked. Well, I figured, if I can’t help my career at least I can help myself by acquiring new abilities, and from someone who knows and doesn’t mind sharing.

  Also selected and travelling with me was Grotowski’s host in Bombay, Rekha Sabnis, though I still fail to see what he detected in common between us. I had flown within India quite often by now but I was really nervous at the prospect of an international flight. Ratna came to see me off and said later she’d had a bad feeling about this trip from the start. Rekha having travelled abroad before knew the ropes; she practically held my hand and guided me to the aircraft. It was the first night I spent in an aeroplane and I didn’t sleep a wink; in fact my heart hadn’t slowed one bit by the time Vienna hove into view. Some two decades later I spent some more time in that magical city, touring with Peter Brook’s Hamlet, and my appetite for architectural beauty was not only thoroughly satiated, it reached saturation point. The surfeit of aesthetics everywhere began to give me indigestion and to behold a faceless rectangular apartment block there was actually a relief.

  We spent the morning taking in the sights within range of the airport, telephoning a friend of Rekha’s who lived in the Vienna Woods, getting set to go there, then remembering she had misplaced her passport, retracing our steps, managing to locate it, and after being fairly comprehensively swindled changing dollars on the street, getting on the Warsaw flight. Poland was at that time, like most East European countries, a fairly depressing place to be in and the biting wind and rain welcoming us there seemed entirely appropriate. Our destination, Wroclaw, was an hour’s flight away, and since we weren’t pre-booked, we thought we’d do the journey by train instead. We struggled to explain to the ticket clerk that we needed two seats on the train to Wroclaw (pronounced Vrotslav) and he, nodding vigorously in comprehension, slipped us two tickets to Bratislava, an error we managed to rectify just in time. There was no rail connection to Wroclaw so we boarded a very bumpy forty-five-minute flight to our destination.

  We landed just as it was turning dark. There was no one to receive us, naturally, and without a clue where to go kept calling the two phone numbers we had and neither one responded. In a taxi we found our way to the institute, which had an almost unnoticeable front entrance bearing no sign, just a number. The door was locked and as we sat shivering in the porch I began to have serious second thoughts about this whole enterprise: being alone, friendless and hungry in a foreign land which made me almost decide to head straight back to the airport and catch the next plane back. The numerous complications involved in such a journey, however, made me desist, and just after I had rung the bell for the fiftieth time and even considered kicking down the door, someone passing by enquired what we wanted. He turned out to be one of the instructors at the institute, and he sheltered and fed us in his home that night. He was maddeningly evasive when we enquired when the work would begin or where we would stay and would just smile mysteriously when we asked when we would get to meet Grotowski—’maybe tomorrow ... maybe not’. I would soon discover to what extent this mythologization of the man would go, and that it too was part of the experiment he was conducting.

  Next morning all the participants, about fifty of us of every nationality, assembled and we were finally admitted into the mysterious portals of the institute, to a huge room where about half of us would spend that night before heading the next day into the forest where the work was to be conducted. Grotowski came in and addressed us for about an hour. I am not quite sure what he said because I didn’t understand most of it, save when he spoke of the need to unlock potential, and that our so-called truthful behaviour is actually no more than a series of ‘conditioned responses’; therefore the need to discover the ‘primal condition’. He preceded and interspersed every remark with pauses long enough to let the silent anticipation of the listeners grow so thick I thought his spectacles would fog over. The rest of what he said sounded so convolutedly esoteric he might have been talking in code, and I wondered what his reply would be if I asked him the time but no questions were allowed and we were given no inkling what the work would actually consist of, but were made to practically take an oath never to divulge anything to anyone about it and also not to discuss it among ourselves. We were also informed that consuming narcotics would not be permitted during our stay. I have no idea about the others but my unease certainly grew.

  There were three other Indians apart from Rekha and myself. They were all from Calcutta—Deepak Mazumdar and Probir Guha, both theatre practitioners, and Gaur ‘Khepa’, a Baul singer of great repute. The verdant, pristine forest we drove into next morning evoked Andrzej Wajda’s films, the pines glistening in the morning dew, the seemingly manicured meadows glowing in the sun, an occasional horned stag bounding past kind of thing. In the heart of the forest was a clearing where two newly built barn-like cottages stood. We unloaded our things, found spots to sleep in and were introduced to the work, if I can call it that. I was prepared for rigorous exercises in physical control and voice work to start with; I had no idea what else would follow. Instead we were divided into groups of five, each with an instructor, and after doing some ritualistic unrhythmic kind of dance which was totally uncoordinated and stayed so as long as I participated, we’d sit in a circle, palms almost but not quite touching the person on either side, and were told to experience the vibrations, while the instructor, in an almost inaudible
tone talked of being aware of the grass and the earth beneath it and asking us to feel the sun and the breeze. I was straining so hard to hear what he was saying that all I could do was give thanks it wasn’t raining.

  At various times different groups of five would go off among the trees and return looking worn out, sometimes drenched, sometimes muddied but always deliriously disturbed. Nourishment consisted of bread and cheese, cold meat, potatoes and, if you were quick enough, eggs. These had to suffice at all mealtimes.

  The days went very slowly past trying to comprehend— while running down a forest path to a clearing, doing some incomprehensible ritual and running back; or wading across a chilly stream, or rotating blindfolded on a sawed-off trunk, or listening to the same repetitive percussion played for hours every night—what connection all this had with what I had come to learn. Discussing it with the others was forbidden anyway and in any case they all seemed happy enough submitting to the restrictions. I was perplexed, not least because we hadn’t even had the benefit of interacting with Grot at all through the week. The prospect of a session with him was always tantalizingly held out to us but he never showed up. I was reminded of Amjad Khan. In the course of one of these exercises, however, fearing for my life while swaying precariously atop a towering pine, I caught sight of him sitting all by himself in a clearing some distance away. I hadn’t even known he was around. Somehow the suspicion that he had planned this appearance just didn’t go away, particularly as he still refused to have anything to do with any of us. Every question asked of the instructors would elicit either silence or an incomprehensible profundity, which actually said ‘I’m not telling’. After a week we were given a break, taken back to civilization and eatable food for two days. I enquired if, while we were here, it was possible to attend a performance at the institute and was greeted with a sigh, a sideways glance and a smiling reply, ‘No more performance. ‘