Naseeruddin Shah, the king of make-believe

Through September, Naseeruddin Shah stepped up in front of packed houses in Mumbai every evening with Motley's The Father

There is a line that separates a good actor from a ham, a line that rings itself invisibly around the stage, separating audiences from performers and the performances. It is one that Naseeruddin Shah knows never to cross. The man who owns the stage the moment he steps on it — be it to read T S Eliot or tease out the nuances in an Ismat Chughtai story or, as he has been doing for a month and more, to walk the stage as an Alzheimer’s-ridden old man — says that most actors make the cardinal mistake of wanting to blur that line between acting and reality. Between stage and audience. They want to make things as real as possible and that, to put it more politely than he does, is disastrous.

“Make-believe is make-believe — actors must be aware of this,” he says. This is not the first time Shah has said this; in interviews and his book (And Then One Day) he has vociferously denounced actors who claim to live the characters they play. “I detest realism. Also the audience never buys into it. They don’t care if we change the set in front of their eyes. It is the actors that find it more difficult to buy into the make-believe.”

Throughout the month of September, Shah and his Motley Theatre Group staged The Father, a French play by Florian Zeller, translated by Cristopher Hampton, at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai. He plans to do the same at Prithvi Theatre at Juhu, a western suburb in Mumbai, starting November 21. And, given the nature of the story (how an old man and his children cope with the vagaries of a mind being hollowed out by disease), he was particularly keen that his team understood the difference between being an actor and playing a character.  

“It is such an emotionally hypnotic play and I did not want the actors so involved that they forgot who they were,” he says. Time and again, though, that is what actors tend to do, thereby miserably letting down their profession. You have to put yourself into the shoes of these characters; you don’t have to become them — that he is clear about. 

Sitting down with Shah is like attending an acting masterclass. To use a metaphor from a sport he is passionate about, he has the ability to break down a scene with the clarity of a batsman playing his hundredth ball in an innings. He relishes the process, perhaps, even more than the act. 
 

A play begins with rehearsal and he insists on a rigorous and long period for all his productions. For this one, the team practised six months before going up in front of the lights. “The process of rehearsal is one of bonding and discovery between the actors. I enjoy it,” he says. 

“I detest realism. the audience doesn’t care if we change the set in front of their eyes”

“The applause at the end of the show, can’t deny I love it, but [it is] not the raison d’etre”

Shah, 67, has reached a stage in his career where he is confident enough to push at the boundaries of his craft, testing his limits and his understanding of what it takes to bring a story to life. And with this play, he is also using the stage as a laboratory for his ideas. There were two things he wanted to test. What it meant to go up on stage every evening for a month, like many do on Broadway. And secondly, when does a play really catches life. “The way we — all theatre groups in Mumbai — work, doing 26 shows takes almost two years. Here we are doing 26 shows in a month.” He speaks, his eyes alight over the experiment underway. 

A play never really catches life until several performances down the line. No one really knows how long it takes. However, as he wore down the floorboards, evening after evening, Shah watched the production expand and grow. He saw the audience and actors play off each other and that for him holds the true joy of theatre. 

When you begin sharing energies with the audience, it is transformative, he says, but warns that it is also risky. “Because a certain kind of actor gets carried away and begins to look for that audience — getting into the good and bad audience trap.” How did he learn to watch his step? 

All credit to the two dramatis personae in his life, two radically different mentors: Ebrahim Alkazi and Satyadev Dubey. Alkazi believed in grandeur and the size of the audience. Dubey was the opposite. “We have performed for just six to 10 people under Dubey,” he says. For him no number was too small: if people had paid, they deserved the best the actors could give. “A full house hasn’t been therefore my driving force; the applause at the end of the show, can’t deny I love it, but [it is] not the raison d’etre,” says Shah. And this is the message he passes on to his Motley team; that it is important to care for the audience and be grateful to them, but don’t work for them. 

All that he has absorbed from Alkazi and Dubey and various books and his own experience, he pours into his troupe. Alkazi was a master at staging, he fussed incessantly about the props, about where an actor would stand or sit or lie down. It was all about the spectacle, less about the acting. Dubey turned it all upside down. He worked with very limited resources. “The sets did not matter, he got to the guts. He was interested in the dynamics of the scene not the aesthetics,” explains Shah.

For Shah, both play a role but he says he always looks to strike a balance. Perhaps that is what encouraged him to add another twist to the current production. The stage was placed at the centre and the audience was seated all around, much like ancient Greek amphitheatres or the jatra stages in rural India. He will have to abandon that to adapt to the Prithvi geography, but as Dubey had demonstrated with great efficacy many years ago, Shah knows how to make do and besides, there are other innovations up his sleeve. 

Over the years, Shah says he has tried to walk the line very carefully between the two big influences in his life. He has also learnt from his teachers at Aligarh Muslim University, from Geoffrey Kendal and his Shakespeareana Company, and his eldest brother, Zaheeruddin Shah, who introduced him to some of the greatest writers. He is keen to pass it on today to all those who ask him how to act. 

What does he tell them? The first thing is that there is more to acting than emoting, because actors are just dying to cry and laugh and, in most acting schools, that is what they are made to do. That is a complete hoax in the name of teaching acting, according to him. It is not a question of recalling the past life but of stimulating the actor’s imagination. “You have to use imagination and observation — the two go hand in hand.” 

Is that what he is doing as an ageing father in the play, struggling with his memory, leaving the audience in an exhausted heap at the end of his performance? Is it all just pretence? Surely, this was real. “There is something called bhava and rasa — bhava is pretence. You, the audience, get the rasa and I just do bhava,” he says, his eyes twinkling.
 

The Father will be staged at Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai, at 9 pm every weeknight, and at 6 pm and 9 pm every weekend from November 21 to December 17