If there is one guarantee in a Naseeruddin Shah interview it is that there won’t be any clichéd answers. He insists on being honest, brutally honest. So when we met him for a quick chat in Bengaluru, he turned the first question on its head. Which era in Bollywood was the best? “The 70s were definitely the worst because all the rot set in then, the coming of colour, success of really mediocre actors, the legitimising of plagiarising by a certain pair of writers, who stole ideas from western films, which became legitimate in the 70s and it still continues to not bother anyone,” Naseeruddin Shah says and continues, “I watched the end of Padmavaat, and it is identical to Mirch Masala. I don’t know if he intended it to be a tribute, but it was astounding!”
Both points of view
Naseeruddin recently performed in an adaptation of Lee Blessing’s A Walk in The Woods, directed by Ratna Pathak Shah. “When I first read the play I found it too distant. But then I thought maybe we could try adapting it by making it a dialogue between an Indian and a Pakistani diplomat, because doing it in the original didn’t make sense. Randeep (Hooda) and Faisal (Rashid) worked on it and they did a basic adaptation. Initially, they were supposed to be acting in the play. But they were both too young. They are both the same age. Here one character has to be older than the other. So I decided to act in it with Rajit Kapur.”
Naseeruddin Shah adds that what appealed to him about the play is “that it doesn’t resort to polemics. The play looks at both their points of view.” One of the best shows they had, he says, was in Dubai. “The audience were both Indian and Pakistani. We had a question and answer session after the play and most of the people who stayed behind were Pakistanis. They were delighted that we raised the subject and the Pakistani character was represented almost in a sympathetic way. They felt dialogue is important. We performed in Lahore too, the audience there, we could sense were a bit apprehensive.”
The question of artistic and cultural exchange is crucial, contends Naseeruddin. “We send our movies there, their serials are seen here. But artistes aren’t allowed in either country. This hypocrisy just gets me. It’s not as if there is an embargo on travelling. Unless person-to-person interaction continues, there will be no peace.”
Reinventing himself
During his over three-decades long career, Naseeruddin Shah has reinvented himself. His performance in the crime web series Zero Kms, directed by Q, was lauded. “Your approach has to be the same whether it be TV, cinema or the stage. You have to deliver the goods,” he says. He continues to essay interesting roles. “I have appeared in one scene in a Marathi film Nude and one scene in a Gujarati film Dhh, Neeraj Pandey’s Aiyaary, Sudip Bandyopadhyay’s Hope aur Home, and The Tashkent Files by Vivek Agnihotri.” And is it truethat some roles rejected by Amitabh Bachchan have been offered to him? “Yes,” he affirms, “They all come to me. There was even a script with the line: ‘Tall with a baritone and a neatly trimmed goatee,” and I told the guy at least you should have cut out these lines before coming to me!”
Naseeruddin Shah is among the few Bollywood celebrities who has remained loyal to theatre, raising the bar of theatre high with his theatre group, Motley. “I love theatre. I cannot understand how actors trained in theatre can ever leave it. Someone who has the benefit of a scholarship of three years has taken up the space of somebody else who might have practised theatre. They see no benefit in theatre, I suppose. Nobody else in the world has the privilege of staging the same play over years, as in the case of Love Letters or Ismat Apa ke naam.”
Love for theatre
Considering that preforming live, and remembering lines, on stage is daunting ...to this statement, he quips: “I have the highest contempt for actors who don’t remember their lines, because that is the first requirement of an actor. I have seen with my own eyes an acclaimed lady actor being prompted for a three-word song!”
But theatre is not given the credit it deserves.Naseeruddin concurs, “ The number of National School of Drama graduates in Mumbai who are actually doing theatre is shockingly low. NCPA has made it impossible to even allow actors to come and perform over there. It’s being used for social functions.” But what about funding? “There have to be more mad guys who want to do theatre and are willing to starve. You need one script, one actor, and one audience. It’s about commitment. To dance you have to be a little mad.”