Diary of a Theatre Actor.
How Indian theatre experiences help in the dissolution of the ego.
Dear Diary,
I have wanted to talk to you about this for so long.
20th October 2019 was the last show I ever performed on stage. Not that I wasn’t offered anything after, but working as a full-time professional actor in an Indian theatre scenario is quite different than it probably would be in other countries.
Today everyone wishes to be famous. If given a choice between backbreaking hard work, and endless fame, anyone would choose the latter.
What theatre bestows is the reverse. Endless hard work, and backbreaking fame.
How is fame backbreaking, you ask? Let me take you back in time.
My last show. 2019.
It is 10.45 pm already. The 9 pm show started only 5 minutes ago because the audience was late.
Yes, despite repeated requests from the producers and even the actors, the audience sometimes refuses to comply with time restrictions. They prefer having a full dinner at home, gossiping with their family and friends a little bit outside the auditorium, then coming and watching the play. Honest to God, dear diary, this is the truth.
Anyway, the play has started now. The lights are already on. The curtain is open. The opening scene of the play, with me in a Gujarati saree and a typical Indian bun talking to my friend in the play, played by a very famous actor, is already on.
We are in the middle of the scene, building up with great energy to the entry of the heroine when suddenly, a phone rings. The shrill ringtone breaks the concentration of the actors on stage. We look for the source and realize that the phone belongs to one older man sitting right in the front row of the theatre, exactly opposite the stage.
The audience is not allowed to keep their phones on when the play is on for obvious reasons. But such rules are mostly always taken for granted.
We can’t continue with the scene because the phone keeps on ringing. The famous actor next to me asks the man quite politely to put the phone on silent mode.
What the man does next shows the level of respect for artists in any developing country.
Instead of apologizing, or putting the phone on silent, he picks up the call. It’s a video call — it’s his grandson on the other end. And the man proceeds to talk loudly on the video call with his grandson, without caring about the play, the scene, or the actors performing live for their entertainment.
No one in the audience tells him to hang up the phone or take it outside. Instead, one person from the back of the row suddenly shouts rather impolitely at the actors on stage: ‘Awaaz…awaaz…munga cho ke?’ which means ‘Be louder. Are you guys on mute?’
The poor famous actor’s face falls. I can see he has felt bad. He looks at me, takes a deep breath, and gestures to continue from where we had left off. The man talks nonchalantly on the video call, and we continue with our scene on stage.
After all, the theatre actors are taught very diligently: the show must go on.
My first show. 2012.
I was a newbie, and hence doing a very small role in a play with two major names as the protagonists.
That day, 1100 people were sitting in the auditorium mainly to watch two very famous Gujarati actors perform live in the play.
The scene with those two actors started. In about 10 minutes, suddenly, the audience started to talk loudly to each other, disturbing the whole atmosphere. In the backstage, we couldn’t figure out what was happening, when suddenly, a friend in the audience came running to us and exclaimed that ‘the audience is leaving.’
What? As we looked, truly enough, except for a couple of rows, people were moving out, and making a lot of noise doing that.
The play paused, and one of the famous actors performing asked them what was wrong. Why is everyone suddenly leaving?
A rude answer came from someone in the audience: ‘What nonsense is this! We want our money back. We agreed to see a comedy box-set play with these two, and not this experimental nonsense.’
A box-set play: is a typical drama, mostly family drama, with a box-set of the location with colourful comedy characters, and lot of melodrama inside a set of the house with living room, stairs, kitchen etc.
Experimental play: The one without a fixed set — the stage is the set, if you understand what I mean, with less number of actors, and more profound subjects: like AIDS, or cancer, or sexual harassment or any social malady.
It didn’t matter to them whether the two actors are famous or not, and have worked for over a month on this play. They just wanted the value for their money.
Many yawn loudly even as a serious scene is on, many fart and snore loudly in sleep even as the actors are breaking their backs performing live, and many are downright rude because they have paid — fame matters zero.
In fact, the more famous an actor is on stage, at times, the more ridiculed he/she is.
Not only by the audience. Everyone, even within the production, puts the failure of the play on the shoulders of the one who is famous.
It’s not depressing, in fact, it’s invigorating.
If taken in a positive way, this kind of struggle makes one even more resilient and humble. The famous actor then has no choice but to accept the fact that fame is nothing but fickle food on a shifting plate.
Hence, in theatre fame is backbreaking — it can break our strength, our back, our pride into a million pieces, and yet challenge us to stand straight.
The show must go on.
It forces us to evolve as human beings, we learn to forgive, we learn to let go, we learn to focus — stay on our path despite many such disturbances.
Hence, theatre is nothing less than a spiritual sadhana, if we take it that way. That’s why, in India, we call the stage — rangdevta — The God of entertainment.
