Shabana Azmi takes a break to muse on her latest play, theatre and the arts in India.
An actor of her calibre can’t be confined to one role. And her new play, Broken Images, doesn’t try. In less than an hour, Shabana Azmi’s stage persona acquires myriad shades: good, bad, shrewd, cunning, lying, vulnerable, pitiable, helpless and neglected. It’s only a human urge, when watching a story unfold, to find one person on whom to pin our sympathy. Azmi says, “The best feedback I got for this role was that the audience can’t make up their minds who the victim is and who the victimiser. I am pleased with that because Girish (Karnad) has built in enough ambiguity to make it a shifting equation.” It would appear that the audience is not meant to decide.
But this spontaneity hasn’t come easy. Azmi, who has also acted in international productions at London’s National Theatre and the Singapore Repertory Theatre, observes, “The rehearsal period abroad is from 9 am to 5 pm daily. So you get a lot of time to explore, to add and to reject. Here, we rehearsed off and on for about three months, just about two hours in the evenings because we are involved in professions other than theatre. It’s a huge pity that you cannot make a living from theatre in India.”
Arundhati Nag, Padma Shri recipient for 2010, played the protagonist in the Kannada and Hindi versions of the play. Azmi admits that watching her made it easier to play the Image in one single take. The unusual thing in the execution of Broken Images is the presence of the “Image”, a recorded version of herself seen on a large TV screen on stage, opposite which Azmi acts. Usually actors watch their recorded performances to rate it by their own, exacting standards. So was it not hard, not to mention distracting, to act with and react to herself? Here, she acknowledges that her sister-in-law, Tanvi Azmi, was invaluable. “A very fine actor, Tanvi played both parts during my rehearsals, so that when I actually had to act ‘opposite’ myself, I knew what to expect. And frankly, I find the Image completely different from anything I have done so far, so she surprised even me!” All that preparation paid off, and the shoot, for which they had budgeted two days, was done in a single take of 44 minutes! “Had I gone wrong in the 43rd minute, we’d have had to do the whole take again,” Azmi points out. Not the sort of tension many would handle with such élan.
But then, Azmi thrives on this very tension. Theatre is about being ready for the unexpected as there isn’t the luxury of a retake, “so the odds against you are higher,” she says simply. “But once you are out there, it is a direct contact between you and the audience; you need to strike a very fine balance so you can play with the audience without playing to the gallery.” Of course, being in front of a camera is no easier, she observes, “where the close-up shot can betray fake emotion to even the least discerning viewer. So I think for an actor it’s enriching to work in both mediums.”
What about cinema and theatre in the larger context? The Padma Shri awards have just been announced; there are 20 awardees in the Arts category for 2010 while just 10 years ago there were only seven. Does this indicate a growing recognition of the arts’ contribution towards change in society? Azmi agrees, “About time, don’t you think? All art has the possibility of creating a climate of sensitivity in which it is possible for change to occur.”
More From This Section
If art can do all this, can it answer this: there has been a burst of interest in Islam in the last decade and everyone wants to understand and depict their perception of Islam — its followers, its philosophy and its misuse by extremists. Can Indian film and theatre really contribute towards this understanding? “There have been attempts by film, though theatre, I am not so sure,” she muses. “To handle a subject as complex as this you need an in-depth understanding of the issue. It works in Khuda Kay Liye, which was technically weak but well-written. Firaaq was a sensitive film that managed to stir without manipulation. But if the film just uses the issue as a peg on which to hang a routine story, it ends up doing more damage than good.”
Azmi is one of those who firmly believe in doing good: she has worked to help slum dwellers over the last 25 years. As leader of the Nivara Hakk movement, she ensured that 12,000 homes were built, free of cost for slum-dwellers evicted from Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park. This, the single-largest rehabilitation project in Asia, is a matter of pride for Azmi. “But it is not even a drop in the ocean in the larger scheme of things,” she confesses, realist to the core. It helped to be an MP in the Rajya Sabha (1993–2007), so that she could influence policy for the powerless, but she continues her work even now. “My father said to me, ‘When you are working for change you should build into that the expectation that it may not occur within your lifetime. But if you carry on regardless, one day the change will come.’ And that is my mantra for life.”
| BROKEN IMAGES Written by: Girish Karnad The play opens with Manjula Sharma, a college teacher and a successful first-time English novelist, seated in a television studio and telling us about the storm her success has generated. She refutes allegations of being a money-grabbing, opportunistic writer who has betrayed her first language, Hindi, to write in English. The tension between the preceived glamour of English literature and the step-sisterly treatment of Hindi novelists is finely nuanced and brought forth by a now defensive, now offensive Manjula, as she flaunts the huge publishing advance and the unexpected fame she has received. Inordinately pleased for having smoothly hit out at her critics on television, Manjula prepares to leave the studio. That is when the live TV screen flickers to life again, an Image of Manjula staring out from it as it engages the author in conversation. Thus begins a riveting dialogue, eliciting truths as it goes along, eventually stripping Manjula down to a reality she has known and denied. |
The confessions the Image extracts from Manjula through simple but incisive questions reveal much about the complexities of human relationships, the love-hate bond between siblings, intellectual companionship in a marriage, and the irreversible consequences of a lie told so often, it becomes the truth, even to the one who utters it. When we create an Image of ourselves for the outside world, we run the risk of it dominating our sense of self, and that is what Broken Images brings out — not in a soft and subtle way but with the brutality of a reflection that tells the truth and will not be silenced.
On stage, Shabana Azmi is not so much an actor as she is Manjula herself: torn, self-interrogating, and devastated as she gives voice to the truth she has subconsciously been aware of all along. The TV screen on stage has its own significance. As Karnad says, “New technologies whisper to us in shimmering figures, seduce us with moving lines, colours and luminosities. Softwares speaking through microprocessors mould our tastes, question our judgments, persuade us to take their messages as our own, so that simulation furnishes us with copies more real than normal reality.”
For fans of Shabana Azmi the stage actor, don’t watch this play expecting anything like Tumhari Amrita or Kaifi aur Main. It is an engrossing performance about the darkness within us all.
Upcoming shows:
MUMBAI
Sunday, January 31, NCPA
Sunday, February 7, Sophia Bhabha Auditorium
Saturday , February 20, Sophia Bhabha Auditorium
Sunday, February 28, Sophia Bhabha Auditorium
HYDERABAD
Thursday, February 11, Hyderabad International Convention Centre
KOLKATA
Scheduled for mid-March; for updates visit www.aceproductions.biz