A Rare Pearl

It took the passing of Pearl Padamsee for the main newspapers in Mumbai (four English and three Indian language dailies) to resonate in unison on their front pages. Rare enough. But Pearl Padamsee, in the 50 years I knew her, was rarer still.

For at least three of the five decades, she supplied a lot of what was red in the veins of city theatre, certainly the English theatre. First as actor and then as director/producer, Pearl Padamsee took the risks, developed the style and created the people. On this last and key achievement, Shyam Benegal said at the city’s crematorium, before her final exit, "She created several generations of actors. In that she is unique."

The list of people ‘discovered’ is impressive: Soni Razdan, Rajit Kapur, Cyrus Broacha, Jasmin Bharucha, Victor Bannerjee, Nikhil Kapur, Sabira Merchant, Vijay Crishna, Sharon Prabhakar, Ronnie Screwvala and Hosi Vasunia, to name a few at random. There were others who, if not launched by her, learned much of their craft from her, like Ali Khan and Boman Irani, and those she worked closely with before they became top marquee names like Naseeruddin Shah and Mohan Gokhale. She was able to work with people of vastly different ages who went on to new things, and not always to do with the theatre.

Amid the sorrowing group at Mumbai’s Chandanwadi was a band of young ones not long out of the J.B. Petit School, the Colaba convents and Campion School. "I was apprehensive, when I first met her," said Faezeh Jalali, "but I lost my fear very quickly. For her, art was discipline. Compromise was not a word she accepted." The memory stirs with work she did in the schools, Dimtimkar Road, The Miracle Worker (Faezeh played Helen Keller), Kamal ka Karishma, Diary of Anne Frank, among many others.

Her one-time husband Alyque says of her, "She was superbly intuitive. She got to the emotional heart of the play, of the role, like nobody else I know." This turned out to be a trans-language gift, as witness her collaboration in the script and direction of Hungama Bombay Ishtyle, apart from her acting in it. Pearl’s personality impacted such actors as Naseeruddin Shah, Amrish Puri and Mohan Gokhale in this zany, first and only feature of the wonderfully talented Ayesha Sayani.

"Pearl," says Alyque, "was an epidemic of zaniness, and I caught the infection at an early age." At around the time Alyque was being infected, Pearl was going off to Sydney, Australia. Her father, Altaf Waiz, became free India’s first High Commissioner in Fiji. She returned with a degree in archaeology. After a failed marriage in Delhi, which yielded two young children, she played Katerina in Alyque’s production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (I was Petruchio).

She gained a scholarship to lambda in London where she systematised a lot that she had picked up instinctively. She also met the great Janet Suzman, starting a life-long friendship. Suzman came to India specially to start the new millennium with her old friend.

I recall Pearl’s first directorial venture, Ionescu’s Exit The King, on the cramped stage of the best Hall, Mumbai. It is one of the best things I have seen, ever, and it is Alyque’s best work as an actor, in my opinion (he played the King). She directed Gieve Patel’s Princes, an experiment in which English dialogue is Parsi-Gujarati inflected. From the safety of a bit part, I watched her memorable production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in which Vijay Crishna played the title role.

I was also around for the extraordinary experience of her Godspell, Mumbai’s first proper musical. It was an explosion of youth, artfully tended and unleashed by the rapidly maturing Pearl. She had now studied with Jean-Claude van Italie in the United States and worked briefly with Grotowski. She returned to Mumbai to present van Italie’s The Serpent and later ambitious productions like Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and the best of European writing for the theatre.

There were five forays into cinema. Khatta Meetha (with Ashok Kumar), Amol Palekar’s Baaton Baaton Mein, Shyam Benegal’s Junoon and the film of Paul Scott’s Staying On. Finally, two years ago came her portrayal of a clairvoyant in a Parsi bagh in Such a Long Journey.

In and around her work in the theatre, she wove the fabric of her personality. She created devoted groups around her, with whom she lived a wonderful synergy. The young bloomed and obeyed in their particular ways. She grew in the skills of identifying talent and strengths, and drawing it all together theatrically. Her terrace in Colaba was a heady weekly club where a cross-section of people in the arts met for rum and garlic bread.

Pearl Padamsee gave many years of her life to Seva Sadan, the substance abuse initiative. It brought into play something she had almost in excess: the capacity to love, a product perhaps of her unusual Jewish-Christian parentage. Countless people went to her for help, counsel and time. In the end, she even wrote an ‘agony column’ in a city periodical.

The theatre in Mumbai will miss her greatly. Her loving humanity will be missed even more. She was 69.