\u201cMost actors start off fairly awkward on stage. It takes most actors a long time to figure out how to know what to do,\u201d says Ratna Pathak Shah. But the observation seems to hardly apply to the 60-year-old, with quite a few flawless performances in a career spanning four decades, to her name. Shah was in the Capital to perform Ismat Apa Ke Naam, a play on the life of the revolutionary feminist writer Ismat Chughtai, as part of the Delhi Theatre Festival. The play brings to the stage, stories set in middle-class Muslim homes \u2014 a milieu that both writer Ismat Chughtai, and the play\u2019s director, Naseeruddin Shah, are closely connected to.<\/p>\n
\u201cEach actor has his or her own process, but I think the discoveries are fairly similar \u2014 How do you make a scene work, how do you make conversation sound like a conversation, and not [a] dialogue, how do you make relationship interesting and therefore understandable to the audience. And if they are helped along [the way] by teachers or good directors, so much the better. I was among the lucky ones, I was helped,\u201d shares Shah, known for her appearances in Mirch Masala (1987) and Mandi, and more recently, Lipstick Under My Burkha and Kapoor and Sons (2016).<\/p>\n
Our conversation veers towards theatre and the Capital\u2019s relationship with it. \u201cDelhi hasn\u2019t been very inviting for the last few years, for some reason (laughs). But I think it still has an audience that is interested in theatre. Hopefully, this is only the beginning of a happy relationship again with Delhi, and Gurgaon now,\u201d says Shah, who last visited Gurgaon with the series Bhishmotsav, a series of Hindi plays adapted from playwright and short-story writer Bhisham Sahni\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n
Back to the dramatisation of Ismat Chughtai\u2019s stories that she is in Delhi for, the actor says it wasn\u2019t just because the play dealt with the way women are perceived and treated in our society, but because the play helped her discover \u201cher abilities as an actor\u201d, that she took it up. \u201cShe\u2019s (Chughtai) is interested in human beings, the man-woman relationship, and is not looking at it with rose-coloured spectacles. She\u2019s not a Bollywood film storyteller, who is telling the same story over and over again, just changing costumes. There were many wonderful discoveries and excitements, while doing this play,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n
Over the years, Shah has been one actor who has remained admirably aware of the medium she has worked in. From the hugely popular sitcom Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, romcoms such as Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Naa (2008) and Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (2012), the 2016 drama about a dysfunctional family, Kapoor and Sons, and the black comedy Lipstick Under My Burkha the same year, to a recent romantic offering on Netflix, where she plays a paranoid Catholic mother, and Ismat Apa Ke Naam, Shah has juggled platforms, genres and roles with consummate ease, over the last decade.<\/p>\n
\u201cI read the script a lot. And usually the script sort of reveals itself as you read. It\u2019s a bit like a detective piecing together a story. Similarly you piece together a character, use your own personal experiences, what you\u2019ve seen other actors do. All kinds of influences operate on you as you try and find your own voice,\u201d she says about the process she embarks on for an acting assignment. \u201cThe job of the actor is to communicate what the playwright wants\u2014putting on weight, cutting hair, growing mooch [beard], whatever [it may take],\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n
On a recent visit to Lady Shri Ram College for Women for a talk, Shah had remarked how Hindi films have struggled with the idea of gender. \u201cWe have a long way to go. Our society has a long way to go. We are not able to see the problem. So many people say \u2018Arey yeh ab nahin hota\u2019, yeh sab kya purani baatein karte rehte ho, \u2018Arey these women are becoming bra-burning feminists\u2019, or \u2018Ok, so you hate men, haan?\u2019 This kind of puerile conversation is still going on. It was happening when I was in college. I\u2019m astounded and so depressed,\u201d the actor says.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut at the same time, so many things are changing, [with] so many women around us in every field. What happened with Frances McDormand? (The actor, in a rousing display of comradeship with her fellow female actors, asked every female actor who had been nominated, to stand up, as part of her acceptance speech for her Best Actress Oscar) She made a point. It\u2019s true we are around.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cMost actors start off fairly awkward on stage. It takes most actors a long time to figure out how to know what to do,\u201d says Ratna Pathak Shah. But the observation seems to hardly apply to the 60-year-old, with quite a few flawless performances in a career spanning four decades, to her name. Shah was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24810,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24811,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24809\/revisions\/24811"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}