The prettily lit-up Prithvi Theatre opened its annual festival with Riding Madly Off In All Directions, directed by Naseeruddin Shah, and featuring him and his entire immediate family - wife Ratna Pathak, daughter Heeba and sons Imaad and Vivaan.
Expectations ran high naturally as his children, too, are reputed to be talented actors.
So, imagine the shock when the lights dimmed and a series of pathetic jokes were cracked over the sound system—silly jokes that an obliging audience laughed to, heartily. Was it going to be an evening of dumbing-down entertainment, with Shah and family playing to the galleries? Walking out would be rude, but sitting through an evening of puerile humour would be torture and worse.
Fortunately, just as it got too much, Shah walked into a spotlight on stage, nattily suited-booted, early 20th century-style, and put the tortured thoughts to rest. The joke was on the audience.
Don’t worry, he assured, that was a not a taste of things to come. Rather, he was about to present a smorgasbord of Stephen Leacock’s writings on stage. And, on cue, a screen lit up behind him with Leacock’s theories on humour. Cerebral musings of the England-born, Canada-bred political scientist and teacher (1869-1944), the theories set the mood for comic entertainment of the serious kind.
“What we are about to present are not stories,” he explained. “Rather they are like individual essays or ruminations that have no connections with one another.”
Making essays come alive, Shah and his family enact different concepts of what is funny. “Making fun of somebody is not humour,” points out Ratna to Heeba, both dressed in early 20th century western attire. But at the other end of the stage Imaad and Vivaan, do precisely that. Each to his own sense of what is laugh worthy…
Would revenge be considered as humour? In a brilliant piece of solo acting, Vivaan plays a conjuror who produces everything from eggs and rings to furniture from thin air; but a spoilsport in his audience punctures each of his acts by stating he pulled them out of his sleeve. Unable to bear his show being thus sabotaged, the conjurer dares the spoilsport to let him have his gold watch which he breaks to pieces. Then he punches holes in the man’s silk scarf and tramples upon his hat. “Do you have anything to say?” he challenges. The man is dumbfounded, and even as a hush descends upon his audience, the canny conjurer ends his show, taking his bow with a flourish as the curtains come down. Sweet revenge or nasty humour? Leacock leaves you thinking.
With the ruminations being set in Leacock’s time, did Shah not have any doubts about their appeal to viewers, an entire century later? “None whatsoever,” replies Shah. “Because they are so brilliantly written. I first read him in The Readers’ Digest when I was in the ninth standard. And he stayed in my head. I was a very poor student of Maths and hated it but after reading Leacock’s satires on the subject I realized that the fault lay with the way it was taught. I taught my sons Maths through cricket scores. Theories of percentage, average and decimals became very simple to understand through the medium of cricket. I have begun to see the charm of Mathematics,” guffaws Shah.
Riding Madly…ended with Shah enacting a writer who wills himself into a deep slumber, so he can transcend into a peaceful, friction-free future. The stage turns pitch dark. And then slowly, fascinatingly, lights up just Shah’s face. Gradually, a little at a time, all of him and the stage is lit up again. The writer finds himself in 3000AD. He is in a glass case in a museum. A stranger, wearing an asbestos outfit, helps him out of the case and on to the main street outside. “What is the time?” asks the writer of the stranger. “After we eliminated death there was no need to keep track of time,” replies the stranger in a flat voice.
Seeing only other asbestos-clothed men like him on the road, the writer asks about women. “These are men and women,” explains the stranger. “Your women wanted to be like men so here they are, exactly like us.”
In 3000AD there are no houses, no vehicles, no children, no food as nature has been conquered, the human body has been scientifically fixed to last forever so nobody needs to eat, work or produce children that grow like fungus. There is no policeman as there is no crime. Everything is perfectly uniform, devoid of emotion, passion or excitement.
The writer is terrified and yearns to be back in his imperfect, wicked, wicked world.
This episode could have been extremely dreary but an actor like Shah makes it humorous even as he conveys the dark, morbid possibilities of over-development. The entire bleak scenario, its emotionless population, stranger and all are created by Shah alone. Transforming essays into acts on stage…wasn’t there a danger of them being as dull as essays?
“No, not at all. I never had that fear. I read the essay about development a year ago and I was fascinated with the idea of doing it on stage. Earlier too, I had staged Krishan Chander’s writings,” ended the master actor who can re-create any space, any time through the sheer modulation of his voice and body language.
(The writer is an independent journalist and author of biographies on Madhubala and Dev Anand.)
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