And Then One Day: A Memoir (30 page)

In fact almost immediately on returning, I saw a news heading, ‘Indian Actor to Play Gandhi’, but the picture beneath it was of Mr Kingsley. I was crushed but not entirely taken by surprise. I had gone to London fully expecting to have to shave my head for the test but no such thing had happened. I was ‘tested’ with Rohini in a scene as the young Gandhi; then to my bewilderment as Nehru in another one with Kingsley as Gandhi; and I could not run away from the fact that he was better equipped to play the part. In any case I wasn’t given a chance to display my wares. It’s a pungent irony that in my entire career this is the one part I went after and it eluded me. I don’t know if I was so eager to play the part itself or eager for the worldwide exposure it would involve. I did think though, when I saw it, that Ben was quite wonderful, he got everything right except Gandhiji’s ear-to-ear smile. I was not at that time skilled enough to have pulled it off the way he did, though. My curiosity to know if I could, however, was finally stilled many years later when I played Gandhi on the stage in a hugely successful production; and merely repeated that performance in a film with so much prosthetic on my face it could have made a Mongolian actor resemble Gandhi if his head were shaved and he wore granny glasses.

D
ubeyji, meanwhile, had written another play,
Apratyashita
(Unexpected), which he wanted to do with Amrish Puri and a few others, myself included. Much as I disliked this perverse piece about an unorthodox relationship I was keen once again to participate in what I understood as theatre and went into it with whatever zest I could summon. If Grotowski had shed no other light, at least he had made me see that I should make do with what was available instead of chasing the end of the rainbow. It was while doing this play that the irony of the actor’s job being completely dependent on other factors became clear to me. Why the very same person could be brilliant in one job and atrocious in another no longer remained a mystery; an actor can only be as good as the work he is in. The categorization of actors into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ began to seem a bit of an injustice, even though there are undeniably some who should not be in the profession at all, and even to call those ones ‘bad’ would be a compliment.

An actor’s output hinges totally on being cast right, on how the scene is written, what the character is asked to do, how he is guided to do it, often even on how he is lit. There is no way an actor can salvage a faulty scene, and this play had them in abundance. It was another ghastly production, and I again performed uncomprehendingly. I seriously began to wonder if Dubey in the theatre was all he was cracked up to be. As a student, I had been hugely impressed with the precision and intensity of his theatre work and the performances by Sulabha and Arvind Deshpande in the luminous film he had made of Tendulkar’s
Shantata! Court Chaalu Aahe,
but working with him thus far had given me no real charge. I was offended by his aversion to what I considered my way of working, and he was determined to make me see that truthful impulses were not all that was required to make an action stage-worthy. It took me a while to come around to his view. He however continued to claim he saw no validity in mine and greatly enjoyed knocking it. He did however continue to cast me, so I guess I was doing something right.

Dubey was accustomed to plotting out the characters’ moves in advance, and after the actors were instructed it was left to them to inject meaning into what he had devised, very much like Alkazi, whose work and personality Dubey had a marked aversion to, though both could scream hysterically at actors equally well. I was at the stage where I felt that exploring possibilities before deciding on a move or an intonation was the way I liked to work, but I could see that Dubey’s technique just like Alkazi’s, despite both being terrible hams as actors themselves, had by now, because of all their years of constructing stage actions, gotten distilled into an infallible instinct for knowing what looked right onstage and what didn’t. Dubey, like Alkazi, had an inbuilt shit-detector and no patience at all with ‘fancy concepts like exploring’. Unlike Alkazi however he was concerned not with the aesthetics but the guts of a scene. All that notwithstanding, my experiences of working with Dubey thus far, and later also—including in Girish Karnad’s
Bali,
Mahesh Elkunchwar’s
Pratibimb
and Dharamveer Bharti’s
Andha Yug
—were dissatisfying. I presume that had I been at the same stage of evolution when I worked with Alkazi I may have found him equally wanting.

As the years went by I grew further and further away from Alkazi’s kind of theatre, and it was when working with Dubey on his beloved Shaw
(Village Wooing, Don Juan in Hell
and
Dear Liar)
that I finally managed to get on to his bandwidth and discovered that his lifelong obsession with perfect diction and clarity of speech was no idle whim, it was as important as the ‘true feelings’ I had always been after.

Dubey’s contention was that in Shaw’s prose, as in the best poetry, the music of the word-sounds contains all the feelings; the words do not need any embellishment, only purity of pronunciation. The same however is not true of Shakespeare, whose worldview or absence of it Dubey also had an issue with and thus did not hold the bard in as high esteem as he did Mr Shaw. I was perplexed at someone scoffing at Shakespeare, but what Dubey said sounded valid.

In Shakespeare the incisive psychological studies of characters at war with themselves are expressed in the most sublime poetry but the plots are hardly worth writing home about; they are in fact utterly predictable. Most of them are borrowed from older works or myth, and he takes major liberties with history. The irresistible P. G. Wodehouse claims (only in jest?) ‘the old bird’s spelling was not quite up to par, neither was his grammar’. I had in any case never found any of his ‘comedies’ funny, but listening to Dubey it began to dawn on me that the action of even the ‘tragic’ or ‘historical’ plays seems to be pushing not towards an accurate representation of, or a significant statement about a society, a people or an era or even an individual, but towards a resolution which more often than not strains credibility, but attempts to be as dramatically entertaining as possible. That is perhaps why the Hindi filmwalas have helped themselves to such humongous doses of Shakespeare—there is no cliché in Hindi cinema that is not borrowed from the man, and I often wonder what popular Hindi cinema would have been like without Shakespeare’s source material.
Julius Caesar
was the first of his plays I’d read and I had many ideas for a production of it. It was, first of all, not a tour de force for a single actor as most of Shakespeare’s great plays are, and unlike any of his other works (the oft-borrowed
Romeo and Juliet
being an exception) seemed to represent the state of affairs in India and elsewhere pretty accurately as well, so I didn’t consider adapting or Indianizing it in order to present it. Humbled at the thought of doing it myself, I tried without success to persuade Dubeyji. Ultimately, many years later, around 1985, I plunged into it myself.

After six months of yelling at the actors, or the light designer or the backstage crew, on opening night my voice disappeared along with my hopes that this production would receive great acclaim. It was an unexpected lesson on how we in India love creating gods and cannot tolerate anything we consider a desecration of them. That so many in the audience were offended by the changes in the script taught me that Mr WS is more revered in India than in his own country, and it really is hard not to smell a cultural conspiracy here, still working after all these decades. Much as I loved the play ever since I’d studied it in Class 9 in Sem, I’d always felt there was something wrong with it. The two halves seem written by two different people. While the initial section is crisp, racy and engrossing, the post-oratory part feels like another play altogether; it refuses even to allude to Caesar’s assassins, all of whom except Brutus and Cassius vanish from the scene without explanation and are replaced by another set of characters who you do not know and care nothing about. Convinced that the conspirators should be shown getting their comeuppance, I altered major portions of the second half of the play including Brutus’s suicide. We were greeted with incomprehension or jeering, which I suspect would have happened even if I had not changed a word of the text. The audiences, such as they were, had come either to be entertained or to see something they thought they knew, and were well and truly baffled. While the real flaw of the production lay mostly in the actors’ diction, and I am not defending it for a moment, I was stupefied by the accusations of ‘blasphemy’, no less, that were hurled at us by teachers of various schools whose students we had hoped to tap as potential audience. They all promised to forbid their students from ever seeing our production. And because I had eliminated all the soliloquies and made them part of conversations, to my disbelief, I was confronted by an irate teacher who accused me of ‘confusing the students in their understanding of reference to context’.

The laryngeal problem I’d had all these years still bothered me, and the stress of mounting a seventy-strong production and playing Brutus in it as well (Benjamin was a wonderfully wily Cassius and Aakash a rotund Caesar), and seeing it not only collapse on its face but be thoroughly roasted, resulted from the second show onward in a forced intake of steroids to restore my vocal chords to normal. After performing
Lear
in school my voice had taken a week to mend; the same had happened after shows of
The Chairs
in Aligarh and
Chalk Circle
at NSD and in almost every play I’d done since, and no one so far had been able to offer anything close to a reason as to why it happened or a solution to remedy it. All they said was ‘stop smoking’ as if that was a magical panacea. Every performance onstage ended with my voice in a whisper. While shooting and dubbing both
Manthan
and
Junoon
I had suffered greatly from this malady and schedules had sometimes to be rearranged. I dwelt much on the thought that my voice would get in the way of performing every night when I went to London to act on the West End, as I surely would some day.

While performing
Don Juan
which had some hair-raisingly wordy passages, the old demon began to reappear. Dubeyji advised me not to speak excitedly in life to start with, to relax and try to discover my own voice, then went further with his analogies to Shaw’s words: ‘They are musical notes,’ he said, ‘you have to hit the right key. In order to discover how a piece should be broken up when spoken, first of all one must respect the punctuation, the right key will follow.’ My desire to overpower audiences with sheer volume had bred in me the habit of straining too hard in performance; that had to be checked. He told me to speak at the pitch the words demanded; it was only necessary for the character you were speaking to to hear you really—that was as loud as you needed to go. And he kept reminding me that I had a breathing problem, but it was only after
Julius Caesar
that I encountered another person who actually suggested concrete steps to help. Till then I hadn’t suspected that one had to learn how to breathe.

I have always had doubts about the existence of God but I do believe in the power of prayer; praying not as in grovelling for something but exuding positive energy, and the prayer is answered by receiving it in return. This person, a Dr Raj Kumar, I sincerely believe, appeared in answer to my prayer and after curing my voice vanished without a trace like the Lone Ranger. A voice and speech therapist who witnessed my whispered performance as Brutus, he came backstage after the show, introduced himself and warned me that my vocal chords would be in serious trouble if I went on thus misusing them. Seeing I could do with help, he offered it. The next morning he was at my house at seven on the dot, and with absolutely no mention of fees commenced the exercises that I had the benefit of for the next six months. Turning up every alternate day, he patiently took me through the technique of breathing with the help of the diaphragm, exhaling in a way to relax the vocal equipment and then, with the exhalation, trying to produce the softest sound the voice is capable of and slowly, painstakingly, enlarging that sound while staying on the right note. The NSD acting teacher’s exhortations to ‘speak from here!’ while slapping her ample midriff had only confused me further; how can one speak from there and so on. She, poor misguided soul, though herself a singer, had never so much as mentioned the words ‘diaphragm’ or ‘resonators’ or even ‘lungs’, and was probably one of those lucky ones who never had the kind of trouble I had. I have met many such actors, who instinctively knew how to use their voices. I, however, had to learn.

It was Dr Raj Kumar who helped me lose my colossal hang-up about not being able to hold a note and persuaded me that there is no such thing as a bad or unmusical voice; every sound box, unless it has a physical disability, is and should be capable of every sound. All of us are born with the ability to sing, most of us lose it as we grow, but it can be recovered. There can be no voice that is by nature off- key. Practising the basic notes on the harmonium, part of the therapy, helped me begin to understand the importance of listening closely to my voice and understanding its mechanics. And now the face of the poor, defeated singing instructor at NSD started flashing before my eyes—I wished I could telepathically reach him. To my unending delight, I can now not only manage to stay in key through the basic notes, and actually travel through three scales, I can tell when I’ve lost the key but continue to grope till it’s found again. I have also, while acting, not lost my voice again in these years—and I’ve had to do plenty of shouting. ‘Listen to the involuntary way your voice sounds when you sneeze or yawn,’ Dr Raj Kumar said, ‘that is your natural timbre. ‘ He insisted that clearing the throat, as people mistakenly keep doing, is actually damaging to the voice if it has gone hoarse; it does not clear anything, it only makes the vocal equipment clash against itself and worsens the condition. What the vocal chords need, then, is the equivalent of a massage and that has everything to do with breath control, which no one in either of the two acting courses I had undergone had even talked about.

His prognosis of my problem was simple actually: I was neglecting to breathe in when the resonant voice which I hoped to constantly produce demanded full lungs, which I did not have, and the technique to control the outflow of breath, which I had to learn. Dying to make an immediate impact onstage the moment I opened my mouth I was exhausting my breath in the first few words of a sentence. Being unable to replenish my lungs while speaking, my body’s backup system was kicking in to help me continue speaking with the precious reserves of breath remaining, and sometimes without any at all. Since voice, as I learnt, is nothing but breath brushing past and vibrating the vocal chords, the backup system too without any breath at all has to give up sooner or later. I had no choice but to keep performing with a bad voice and thus I’d strain harder, not only inflicting further damage but also at times experiencing strange sharp twinges of pain in my ribs and around my kidneys, which I should have known were warning signs that I was doing something wrong. And sure enough, I had been doing it wrong all this time, as the good doctor pointed out on the first day after asking me to demonstrate how I breathed onstage. Having performed this rescue Dr Raj Kumar made me promise I’d continue the exercises on my own and vanished from my life. I was unable to reach him at the only number he left.