'I'm attending Bollywood dance classes'

By George! That’s Naseeruddin Shah preparing to play an aging superstar. As for serious pursuits, there’s theatre to turn back on.

At sixty, Naseeruddin Shah is the perfect epitome of the adage ‘Never say never’. Whether it was playing a villager and grooving to Oye Oye in Tridev, or essaying the role of a ghazal singer who is an undercover agent in Sarfarosh or giving voice to the angst-ridden middle-class Indian citizen in A Wednesday!, Shah has time and again tread new grounds and enthralled us with his acting prowess.

After acting in several films over the last three decades, this year he has decided to take a break from cinema and dedicate himself solely to theatre. He says with a resigned shrug, “I’m tired and bored of films. There is no hope on the horizon for Hindi cinema. For one Dibakar Banerjee or Anurag Kashyap, we have hundreds of filmmakers who dole out mediocre stuff in the name of entertainment. I did four movies last year and all of them were big disappointments.”

That prompts the next question. Is he upset about Vishal Bhardwaj’s 7 Khoon Maaf’s dismal performance at the box-office earlier this year? Shah retorts, “I didn’t think the movie was a great idea even when I read the script, but Vishal is a dear friend and I didn’t want to disappoint him. I think rather than seven, there should have been only three husbands. It was imperative that the audience should love Susanna in the first five minutes into the movie so that they could empathise with her. But that didn’t happen.”

However, letting bygones be bygones, Shah is now visibly excited to be a part of Milan Luthria’s Dirty Picture based on Southern siren Silk Smitha’s life. Apart from romancing Vidya Balan again, he will also be seen as an aging superstar showing off his dance moves with much gusto. He says sheepishly, “It’s not my strongest area. So I have been attending Bollywood dance classes everyday.”

Ask him how is he planning to play an aging superstar and he says cheekily, “There are plenty of those in the industry from who I can draw an inspiration.” Later, on a serious note, he adds, “I’m going to model the character on myself, and think how would I react if I was a superstar. Since down South, the films are known for their action sequences, it will be quite a challenge to practice them with as much panache. It will be different from what I have done before as the movie will have obscenely loud décor, action, dance and atmosphere of the Tamil films of the ’70s.”
Prod him a little about his co-star and Shah also lets out a little secret about her, “Vidya is lovely but she has a tendency to giggle in the middle of the shot. And this time, she will definitely get to laugh a lot, thanks to my dancing skills.”
Apart from Dirty Picture, Shah is not shooting for any other film this year.

Instead, he is directing four new plays and paying an ode to one of his favourite writers, George Bernard Shaw. His first production By George that is a collection of Shaw’s two plays — Village Wooing and How He Lied To Her Husband and a poem (English Pronunciation) — will premiere at Mumbai’s National Centre For Performing Arts on April 2. While Village Wooing follows the adventures of a travel writer (Faisal Rashid) and a talkative ‘phone operator (Ahana Kumra) who wants to marry him; How He Lied To Her Husband is a comedy about how a smooth talker (Anand Tiwari) manages to fool his lover’s (Trishla Patel) husband. English Pronunciation recited by Kenny Desai deals with the peculiarities of spoken English.

Shah admits that the litterateur’s lucid language, lovable characters and diverse themes prompted him to direct his works. He says, “I love Shaw’s writing, his language, characters and the theme of his plays. My students (Rashid and Kumra) studied Village Wooing as part of their acting course and did a good reading. Satyadev Dubey had directed Ratna (Pathak Shah) and me in it over two decades ago. It’s a little-known play that is charming and funny. But the piece wasn’t long enough to be staged as a single play, so I decided to club it with two other works and turn it into a 115-minute production.”

While Village Wooing and How He Lied To Her Husband share a common thread and are affectionate satires on wooing, wedding and the aftermath, English Pronunciation deals with the idiosyncrasies of the language. Explaining its significance, the actor-director says, “Language was one of Shaw’s major concerns. It should be spoken with as much clarity and purity as possible. Sadly, English is not spoken the way it should be, anywhere anymore, not even in England.”

But it wasn’t too difficult for Shah to extract a good performance from Desai, thanks to the latter’s impeccable pronunciation. The veteran artiste says, “Kenny’s English pronunciation is excellent. He belongs to the old school and had the right teachers. Today such teachers have disappeared. So many people today don’t know when we say ‘the’ and ‘the’ (pronounced as thee).”

Shah will follow this play up with Shaw’s Arms And The Man that will be staged during Summertime Prithvi, the annual children’s festival held by Prithvi Theatre in May. A comedy set during the 1185 Serbo-Bulgarian war, it is about a young woman who rejects her fiance, a war hero, and falls for a Swiss soldier. The play might sound too complicated for kids but Shah says, “Children should not be subjected only to physical comedy. They should be exposed to plays like Arms And The Man that appreciate spoken English.”

In July, Shah will team up with Rajit Kapoor in an adaptation of Lee Blessing’s famous play A Walk In The Woods. The story about two Cold War diplomats, a Russian and an American who, in the midst of a peace conference at Geneva, decide to take a break, walk in the woods and interact as men rather than as statesmen, has been adapted by the sexagenarian and now revolves around an Indian and a Pakistani diplomat. “It’s a poignant story about friendship and touches upon topics of cross-border terrorism and infiltration.”

Finally at the end of this year, he will present Teesra Salaam, the third play by his group Motley, which dramatises the delightful writing of Ismat Chughtai. “I relate to these stories as they are set in the milieu from where I came,” he admits.
For an actor of his calibre with a wide repertoire of work, Shah is still raring to go and wants to direct plays like Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Shaw’s St Joan and more of Chughtai’s works. He says, “I want to do these productions as they are great plays.”

Shah, who started off his career with the stage over three decades ago, is not too happy with the current scenario. “Theatre is still a fringe activity. Sometime back, there were many film ‘stars’ who jumped on to it to make some quick money. They were like termites, but thankfully that phase is over. But there has neither been a renaissance in writing nor have we discovered anything new in the field of writing. The only thing that has changed is that now theatre has more visibility. I strongly believe that theatre should be done only to communicate with the audience,” he says.