RAD TIMES: Scripts and Theatre!

I love good acting. I adore, I worship it.

But a script that is well researched has a butterfly effect on my soul.

When I started reporting on theatre, before I could experience the genius of an actor, it was a script that caught my attention. The script used by small and big theatre groups and mostly experimental theatre groups in Pune was so diverse that it boggled me.

Before, I could launch myself on stage, I started reading and taking notes on these scripts. I found acting was an extension of the scripts, like the writer has left space for the actor to improvise and create and take ownership of it. But also connect with the script in many different capacities, as a potential actor, as a director, as a shadow, as a student, as a confused artist, as a established actor, as a reader and find your universe of expression, as an untrained actor, as a nobody, as an old woman, as a clerk, as a human being. Why give yourself airs of an actor, even before you have connected with the script ?

Maybe you can take the words forward and act, maybe you can take the precise word and act, maybe you can try and skip the words, and use your own physical language. And maybe, you wait for the script to empower you from the voices of the past. I do believe, connecting with the script is like making alive the voices of the past and maybe speaking to them , that makes you mores satisfied with your craft.

I also feel the subtext and the sub-conscious mind that is at play; in fact many subconscious minds, need time to be connected with. The script is a breadth of life, of another time and generation, but is two weeks or a month enough to bring out the voices from the words ?

Ideally, how much time should be spent with a script ?

I really feel a lot, lot more than it even demands to perform on stage.

Over the years of reporting in Pune, Mumbai and online theatre and film festivals in London, New York and Broadway, nothing is more putting off than not doing enough justice to the script.

Throwing the lines and winning the applause, but what about language, the syntax, the accents…have they grown for the language with you ?

Do we have responsibility as an artist to help a language grow and keep it alive ?

Some scripts of plays which has really boggled my senses are:

1. Me Ghalib, ( Natak Company Pune used to perform this )
   

2. A script by Rainer Maria Rilke ( A small theatre group which is inactive now used to perform this )

3. The Exile by Mahmud Darwish ( translated and adapted by Pune based scientist and director Niranjan Pendekar )

4. Dashananad ( Directed by Pune based director Suyog Deshpande )

5. Ghar Ke Aandar ( Directed by Rupali Godambe )

6. A Shakespearean experimental play ( performed by Vinay Pathak )

7. Gigolo ( performed by Devang Tiwari , a Lucknow based artist )

8. Chaheta, Main Hoon Yusuf and The Nether ( performed by Aasakta Kalamanch .)

9. kavyachao Gaon ( Directed by Pradeep Vaidya )

10. A script by Harold Pinter ( Directed by Girish Pardeshi )

    
    

    And when a hardworking actor picks up a script magic happens! Give scripts time , even after the performance even after the applause has died down!

    Theatre empowers not because you are an actor, but because you connect with reality and truth whether in a script or direction or acting; and knowing the place and position of each. Just hammering your face on stage, is the most uncreative thing to do. Connect maybe and then let the magic unfold! Being positively critical is a tool of iron-man proportions!