THE publicity that Naseeruddin Shah received prior to the staging of Cyrano must have been extremely gratifying for the middle-aged Indian actor. A respected daily such as The Independent described him as "one of the biggest movie stars in the world". The writer, having introduced Naseeruddin Shah as a "cinema superstar" of India and the "45-year-old millionaire from Bollywood" waxed eloquent on "the Dustin Hoffman of India".
Billed as the first joint production of its kind between Britain’s prestigious, state-funded Royal National Theatre and Tara Arts, an Asian theatre company, the verdict after the press preview held in London on October 25 came as somewhat of an anti-climax to all the hype and buildup. "This is one of those frustrating productions which promises much more than it delivers," pronounced The Telegraph. Indian film director Shyam Benegal, who has directed Shah in many of his films, walked off half-way through the play.
So, are Shah the actor, and the French classical comedy, Cyrano—as adapted to the early 20th century India and staged in English with a liberal sprinkling of chaste Urdu and Indian swear words—a complete washout in theatre-obsessed England? No, not yet. But before pronouncing a judgement on the reception the play has received and can further expect as it tours England, a broad brush sketch of the original play and its adaptation to the Indian milieu would provide a better perspective.
In the celebrated French classic Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano, the protagonist, is a soldier-poet. But his problem in life is his nose—far too big, and grotesque. It is Cyrano’s `nose complex’, which deters him when it comes to matters of love.
Fearing rejection, he dare not express his love for Roxanne. On learning that she is attracted to a handsome but callow youth, Christian, Cyrano strikes a deal with the young man. He composes Christian's love letters to the sensitive and aesthetic Roxanne, who soon falls in love with Christian. Cyrano consoles himself with the thought that Roxanne, in reality, loves his spirit, albeit in a more handsome man. Roxanne and Christian get married. But Christian—unable to live with the fact that Roxanne loves him not for his looks but his poetry (which is not really his)—commits suicide. Cyrano does not ever divulge that it was he who authored everything Christian addressed to her. Fifteen years later, Roxanne discovers the truth—when Cyrano is dying.
While adapting the French work for their production, Ranjit Bolt and Jatinder Verma have set it in the India of the 1930s. The cast, ethnicity-wise, is a mixed one and Cyrano (played by Shah) is a brave man who can take on any number of opponents. He is a prompter for a roving theatre group in Jodhpur, has a big nose and pines for Ruksana, a fellow actress in the troupe. Ruksana is played by Kumiko Mendl of Japanese and German descent. Ruksana’s suitor Kishan, played by Andrew Mallet, an Anglo-Chinese actor, is a smart Delhi-bred recruit in the Jodhpur troupe. The rest of the cast is largely Indian, British and Asian. Directed by Anuradha Kapur, who once taught at the National School of Drama, Delhi, the music has been composed by well-known music director Vanraj Bhatia, who also composed the music for Shyam Benegal's Nishant, Bhumika, Manthan, and tele-serial Tamas.
The production’s most distinguishing feature, besides of course the adaptation to a purely Indian setting, is the attempt at communicating simultaneously to an English-speaking audience and those who would appreciate the nuances of Mirza Ghalib’s poetry, the sexual overtones of a recipe of minced meat and karela or the pathos of the protagonist when he holds his head in his hands and says "wah re bahanchod kismat". In the press preview—where the audience was a mixed one—there were times when some in the audience burst out laughing from one section of the hall while others wondered what the joke was all about.
If the preview is to be judged by yardsticks adopted back home in India, one is likely to infer that the rapport between the cast and the audience could not be uniformly established. And hence one may be inclined to pronounce the performance a failure. Shah, for instance, was often delivering his dialogues looking straight into the audience—more of an Indian theatre tradition—and yet failing to establish contact. Benegal observed: "Barring Naseeruddin, hardly anybody made much of an attempt to establish that rapport."
Benegal may have a point. But there are those who caution against reading too much into the cast's "inability" to establish "rapport". As Michael Manglo, a theatre buff, countered: "In the English theatre tradition, the audience arrives in the hall to be entertained, not participate with wah wahs! Except in pantomime, the audience just does not respond." Peter Griffith, a producer at Britain's popular domestic radio, Radio 4, said that though at times he could not get the nuances of the dialogues when they were delivered in Urdu, he had no problems following the play. The music, he said, was mesmerising. Critical appraisal ranged from "the opening was a bit slack" to "towards the end, the play really gripped the audience, keeping them on the edge of their seats".
If a section at the preview, held at the National Theatre in London, were nonplussed, that may not necessarily hold true when the play goes, for instance, to Bradford which has a sizeable Muslim population. For such an audience, which lives in England, listens to music from the Indian subcontinent and appreciates Urdu poetry, the Cyrano adaptation may just about have them in raptures. Clipped English, chaste Urdu, a setting that they yearn for, the milieu that they miss and the swear words—all coming in one flow—may be an entirely novel experience. Clued into Indian cinema as they are, Shah’s is a well-known face and is bound to draw more such audiences in the UK.
As for Shah himself, he has won admirers, as much for his acting abilities as for the person he is. Peter Griffith, who interviewed Shah for Radio 4, is one of them. In the interview yet to be broadcast, Shah says the first time the question of religious identity hit him was when he was summoned by the school where he had admitted his son to fill in the column asking for the child's religion. Recalls Griffith: "Shah angrily said `How can I tell you the religion of a child when he is so small. He has a Muslim father and a Hindu mother and he can exercise his options only when he grows up’." Radio-4 plans to give 15 minutes to the interview, a good length for a programme this kind. Why? "It makes good listening", said Griffith.
The Indian actor's acting skills have come in for praise from virtually all quarters, though Griffith admitted—a point which others too made—that on the first day of the preview, Shah seemed a bit tense and tentative, as though trying to strike the right chord with the audience.
The joint production by Tara Arts—a company formed in the late '70s when racial tension was rather high in British society—is not only the group's first full scale collaboration with the Royal National Theatre, it is also, perhaps, the first venture of its kind in as much as it tries to stage an adaptation in English but adapted as comprehensively to the Indian milieu. If the play succeeds in both England and India—where it will be staged in February ‘96—it would indeed have broken fresh ground. Both for its choice of idiom and communication across cultural divides.
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