Art curator Ina Puri spoke to actor Saurabh Shukla after being spellbound by his stage production Barff at the Kamani Auditorium in Delhi. Shukla opened up about the play — it will be staged at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolkata on January 31 — that brings up issues that linger in the mind even after the curtains come down.
Ina Puri: I cannot even begin to say how much I enjoyed Barff. It is a gripping thriller but it is also provocative, contextual and deeply-layered. As the scriptwriter, director and actor, this is no mean feat. Tell us a bit about the making of Barff.
Saurabh Shukla: Thank you very much for liking the play so much. I have always been fascinated with thrillers. In India we have all kinds of plays but we hardly have original thrillers in Hindi. So, I was very excited to write a thriller. But as you keep on with the journey of this story, it goes beyond a thriller. A thriller is about what’s going to happen next, and that I used as the device, but the play is actually about the deeper meanings of the character’s life and what they are going through. Whatever worldview you have, you always end up writing it in your plays. I think Barff is a mix of all that. It took me almost seven years to finish writing the story.
Ina Puri: You use the stage to show different times and locales and while the sets appear simply constructed, you use light to create moments of intimacy and mystery. The actors create magic not only with their acting but also as singers.
Saurabh Shukla: I have been very lucky. Ashvin Gidwani and his company AGP World took this as their production and we opened this show in Bharangam (by the National School of Drama) in 2016.
Then we opened the play commercially at the Sophia Bhabha Auditorium, Mumbai, to houseful shows. At the very first show we got the vibe that the audience loved it. We have done around 200 shows and it has been loved everywhere… in India, in the US, in Dubai, in Hong Kong. What I’m happy about is that we had a repeat audience and they told us that this was a story that stayed with them for a very long time.
Ina Puri: You have had a very successful career as a National Award-winning film actor, with roles ranging from serious to comic, in blockbusters like Satya, Yuva, Lage Raho Munna Bhai, Barfi!, Jolly LLB, Raghu Romeo, PK and even Slumdog Millionaire. One is left wondering how you balance the two lives.
Saurabh Shukla: When I came to Mumbai, I never exercised because I thought there was no time for it. There is a childhood sport, table tennis, which I took up in 2011 and I found a group that played table tennis. And suddenly, to my surprise, I always had two to three hours a day to play. So, it’s not that you don’t have enough time. If you love something enough, you always find time for it.
Ina Puri: Please share some of your memories of performing in Delhi in the early years of your career. Which were the playwrights you admired?
Saurabh Shukla: The very first play I read even before starting theatre is Arthur Miller’s All My Sons because it happened to be in our English graduation course. I wasn’t a great student. I was scared of reading a textbook… you know one that is prescribed in the education system. I was very apprehensive of that. But reading that play was a wonderful experience. It was very engaging, very meaningful. I felt it was more than a thriller, it had many layers. And I think that my journey of writing started from there.
The second author I discovered when I started doing theatre and who made a great impression on me is Mohan Rakesh, his understanding of character and use of language. I read his Aadhe Adhure and the dialogues sounded like a conversation between two or three people. That had a big impact on me. Then of course I read John Osborne, Shakespeare and many others. But the first impressions were made by those two writers.
Ina Puri: What was your first experience in cinema like, when Shekhar Kapur directed you in Bandit Queen?
Saurabh Shukla: I’m really thankful to him. My introduction in cinema happened through Shekhar Kapur and it made me realise that theatre and cinema are two different mediums. Theatre has a theatrical language where words become very important. It’s not that there is no theatre without language but the language has a big part to play in theatre. Cinema has a language of images; it doesn’t really like too many words. That was my first learning when I did Bandit Queen.
Ina Puri: Sometimes an actor is remembered for a certain role they have played and that becomes the defining narrative when there is a discourse on them. Would you agree?
Saurabh Shukla: Frankly speaking, I’m really not bothered about how people will choose to remember me. I’ll keep trying things and I will hope that they’ll remember me for many different kinds of roles.
Ina Puri: You’ll be performing Barff in Kolkata on January 31. What has been your experience with the city so far regarding your theatre?
Saurabh Shukla: Kolkata is not new to me. I have my in-laws there. It’s my home. I have been visiting Kolkata and I completely love the city. I was raised in Delhi and I work in Mumbai. And the city where I don’t live but always want to go because of the people, the culture and the food is Kolkata. I had great interactions on my previous productions when I performed in Kolkata. The audiences are great. They really love it, they are very responsive. I’m so excited.
Ina Puri: With regards to our own theatre, do you feel we are anywhere close to the West when it comes to theatre productions?
Saurabh Shukla: Well, there are two parts to it. One is a purely creative part and the other is the production part. Creatively, even if you have less opportunities or lack of support, great talent remains great talent.
When it comes to the production part, of course we are nowhere close to the West in terms of the money spent on theatre. The very basic system we do not have here is a ‘run’. We don’t have a run of a play. I was in New York and I went to see Harry Potter and I realised that it had been running in the same theatre from Tuesday to Sunday for the last seven and a half years. But in terms of aesthetics, I think we are no less. I can say that you will find similar standards of aesthetics and grandeur in Barff too.
There is another thing we must not forget and it is that Barff was actually written as a film first and then adapted for theatre. The cinematic language where a lot of realism can be used is very difficult to create in theatre because you cannot go to a real location. We have created an ambience and I got this feedback a number of times where people said they felt they were transported to the place where Barff is happening.
Ina Puri: Do you have any plans of making a film anytime in the future? Were you ever inclined to work with makers of parallel cinema?
Saurabh Shukla: I think parallel cinema has really vanished. These days if you see, there is nothing of what we had in the ’70s or in the early ’80s when we had a clear line between arthouse cinema and commercial cinema. Today there are so many films that are commercial hits and they have the aesthetics of the cinema of the ’70s and ’80s. I would of course try and make a film. But in films, there are much bigger activities and they take their own sweet time. So, let’s hope for the best.
