The Shaw-Shah Connection

The latter,along with Shaw’s one-act-play How He Lied To Her Husband and the poem English Pronunciation,were staged this weekend as By George by the Mumbai-based theatre group Motley. As an actor,theatre artist and director,Naseeruddin Shah shares Shaw’s obsession with language and all the finer nuances of accent and diction. If you stand by and watch a rehearsal of By George or Motley’s next Arms and the Man,even something seemingly innocuous as ‘the’ disrupts one if an actor forgets that this treacherous article becomes “thee” when used before vowels and “theh” before consonants. Shah’s stress on pronunciation becomes notable and au courant as Arms and the Man is scheduled to premiere at Summertime,the children’s festival at Prithvi Theatre,this week.

Shah was exposed to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s work as a six-year-old,thanks to Geoffrey Kendal,actor and manager of theatre company Shakespeareana. After watching Kendal’s production of Arms and the Man,Shah was intrigued by characters like “the chocolate cream soldier”. This experience helped him understand the play better when he studied it in high school. Now,he hopes that his production too has a similar impact on young viewers. “Besides,children will discover the joys of Shaw’s beautiful language instead of watching actors falling around or making faces,” he says.

A self-proclaimed “Shaw-devotee”,Shah rues that imperfect diction among actors has affected English theatre in India. Not to mention that Shaw’s plays are tough to present. Now that Shah has returned to Shaw adaptations after a gap,the good news is that he plans to stick to it. “I may just do productions based on writings of Ismat Chughtai and Bernard Shaw for the rest of my life,” he says.