On Centre Stage

Price: Rs 3,000

It is always a thrill to come across a new book on Indian theatre,given that such opportunities are few and far between. This time,my thrill lingered a long while. In fact,it still remains,as I dip in and out of The Act of Becoming: Actors Talk,edited by Amal Allana,a truly delicious coffee table book. I delight in the wonderful gems that I come across,which take me back to another era,to a world that came alive each night on stage and the actors who inhabited it and held it dear.

As Richard Schechner,theatre director and professor of performance studies at the Tisch School of the Arts,New York University,says,In India8230; there is a complex weave of the indigenous and the imported,the traditional and the modern . The book connects this deep knowledge earned by practice with the practice of other artists from the 19th century on to our own days. What Allana has done is to vastly increase our experiential knowledge of what these artists did by presenting them in their own words,within their own cultural contexts. In the introduction,Allana says,This book is an assemblage of oral histories,memories,confessions of actors and sometimes directors about actors about the way they feel about their work,their working conditions,their careers,and their lives. And she has done a remarkable job. Not only are we transported into the magical world of theatre across the country,this book also manages to contextualise the times and the social standing that the stage had over the past 150 years 1850s-1990s. Only about a third of the actors in the book were just actors,two-thirds of them were involved in other aspects of theatre such as playwriting, directing,managing etc. Thus they contributed considerably to the theatre practice of their times.

Having grown up listening to theatre stories through my childhood,these narratives inspired me. Like comfort food,these are my comfort stories. Just to know of the junoon in these actors and their own theatre-ka-keeda Satyadev Dubeys pet description for all theatre-mad people is hugely encouraging. Right from the enormous task of bringing women to the stage at the turn of the 19th century that Girish Ghosh crusaded for,to R Nagarathnammas first all-woman theatre group in Karnataka to Sombhu Mitras search for the existential answer to Why theatre?,the book covers a vast terrain. The section on Mitra delves into the craft of theatre and speaks of the need to create new forms of theatre suited to modern times. It talks of how he believed that theatre establishes two types of relationships: one,between man and his society,and the other,of man with himself.

I grew up hearing of my grandfather Prithviraj Kapoors company travelling by train in the third class,needing three extra compartments to be attached to the train for the entire company which consisted of tailors and cooks as well. And then in this book,I discovered B Jayashree too travelled with her grandfathers Gubbi Veeranna Natak Company as a child,and,on occasion,they even got entire trains for their company to travel in. It was heartening to read Naseeruddin Shah talk of the need to devise an indigenous actor training methodology and complain that we have been looking too much to the west when guys like Brook and Grotowski found their inspiration here.

At the end of the book,there is a compilation of the biographies of actors and major companies with each actors play lists mentioned in detail. It is invaluable information,particularly because,as Allana mentions,In a rather bleak archival scenario where no substantial and organised national or private holdings on theatre are currently available,the process of documenting any aspect of performance is a Herculean task.

When people come up to me and recount their meetings with my grandparents both Geoffrey and Laura Kendal and Prithviraj Kapoor,I long to grab their hand and sit them down and make them tell me their stories of the shows they saw and the feelings they evoked. Of the world at that time. Schechner aptly says,To thrive in the future we must work in the present. And to work successfully in the present,we must know the past. In doing so,we are each in the midst of the act of becoming. This book is an invaluable treasure. Thank you to all those who made this book happen.

The writer is a theatre personality and co-founder of Junoon