Khujli,” answers Ratna Pathak Shah. The itch. The question: what has kept the theatre group Motley going for 40 years? “Another reason is that it’s the only place where you can train as an actor,” she adds. “How do you work on your craft or on your mind and soul as an actor? In cheap comedies or soap operas?” Naseeruddin Shah mutters “brain damage”. “Or shoot for one bad movie after another,” he says. “Theatre saved my sanity. Because one could engage with worthwhile writing instead of the rubbish one was doing in the movies.”
On a rainy Mumbai morning, the Shahs, between rehearsals in the basement of an auditorium in Dadar, reflect on the history of Motley and what keeps it going. It all started in 1978 when Naseeruddin was shooting a film with friend and colleague Benjamin Gilani in Lucknow. “We had no name, no play, no cast, just that once we agreed to work together, it came together,” says Gilani over a phone conversation. “Right from the start, it was personal.”
Around the same time that Motley emerged, Prithvi Theatre in Juhu, too, was getting off the ground, so it became the perfect time for Mumbai’s English theatre scene to develop. Motley’s first production was Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in July 1979. Over the years, they have performed major classics, including the works of Anton Chekhov, Harold Pinter and George Bernard Shaw. “Purely instinct,” says Naseeruddin, on what governed their choice of plays. “I never thought Motley would survive for 40 years or that we would develop the audience we have. I feel very gratified about it.” To celebrate its four decades, the group will stage five of its plays, along with readings, as part of the Motleyana Festival, to be held at Prithvi Theatre in Juhu from July 16-28 and at Veer Savarkar Auditorium at Shivaji Park, Mumbai, from August 6-10. Prithvi House, too, will host its own readings and discussions from July 18-28.
In its first two decades, Motley focused on English plays, their approach largely austere; an aesthetic derived from Satyadev Dubey, despite Naseeruddin’s previous affinities for the grander stylings of Ebrahim Alkazi. “We don’t believe in dazzling the audience with sets…. I don’t feel it’s my cup of tea,” he says. “The magic of theatre is the stimulation you can provide to the audience’s imagination. And only words can do that. The most important thing is to communicate the text….”
Much of their early work focused on smaller productions, with an emphasis on text and performance. “We like words, we don’t want to dispense with words,” says Ratna. “There are those who do and, sometimes, skilfully. But that’s not our opinion.”
In 2000, Motley added Hindustani works by Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai and Premchand to their repertoire. The shift was largely motivated by a need to perform in their own language and “a need to play Indian characters”, says Ratna. “We were constantly pretending to be westerners. It gets tiring. You can find linkages…but how much can you pretend to sit in a way that a white person does?”
Motley now has six people at its core and a fluid membership, depending on the play being performed. The word “motley” recurs in Shakespearean plays and was picked by Gilani, who had studied, taught and performed Shakespeare. “It means variegated and so were our plays and the people who have joined us over the years,” says Gilani. Aside from Godot, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial and Dear Liar have been among their most successful productions.
The Shahs are disappointed with the quality of Hindi theatre-writing now. “Highly moralistic” and “horribly sentimental”, says Ratna. Indian theatre, which has been struggling on the sponsorship front, is yet to find its identity, says Naseeruddin. “There was a time when a renaissance was in the offing in the 1970s. But the whole wave seemed to have subsided after that generation,” he says. “It didn’t breed another generation…. I don’t know why.”
Despite their cinema work, the Shahs have always made space for theatre, even rehearsing on set. “We just love the act of theatre and have always found ways of doing it,” says Naseeruddin.
read the full story about The Company They Keep | Theatre
#theheadlines #breakingnews #headlinenews #newstoday #latestnews #aajtak #ndtv #timesofindia #indiannews
Leave a Reply