If there is one sub-genre today that secures top billing for good-looking actresses of a certain age, it is that of the Grand Dame Noir - where an aging diva nurtures glorious fantasies of resurrection. The play WHERE DID I LEAVE MY PURDAH, written by Mahesh Dattani and directed by Lillete Dubey, is about an octogenarian former star who is nostalgic for the glorious days of historical theatre -- a character played by the decades younger Dubey.
Aged Nazia (Lillete Dubey) is a faded theatre diva of 1950s musical theatre and founder of the fabled theatre group The Modern Indian Theatre, ostensibly a reference to real-life post-Partition companies like IPTA and Naya Theatre. Once famed for portraying the mythical Shakuntala, seduced and abandoned by philandering king Dushyant, Nazia is now reduced to granny roles in mainstream film. Though aware of her fall from grace, she remains a go-getter. At the end of Scene One, she has ditched a film shooting and announced her intention to revive the play Shakuntala through a gutsier retelling.
Troubles begin when Nazia is auditioning a ditzy young actress (Priyanka Karunakaran) to play the modern Shakuntala. Ruby (Soni Razdan), daughter of Nazia's dead sister Zarine, offers to find Nazia a producer for a price. She wants Nazia to publically exhume the truth of the historical Shakuntala productions. Her suspicion being, Shakuntala was played not by Nazia but by Zarine. Nazia is quick to rubbish the claim. This push and shove which drives the play's theme of wilful duplicity, marked by the titular purdah or veil, throws open the distant past.
Sisters Nazia (Neha Dubey) and Zarine (Soni Razdan) once lived in Lahore where Nazia, an actress, assumed the role of Shakuntala to Dushyant, played by real life beau Suhail (Sid Makkar). At the time of Partition, on board a train to India, Zarine is killed and Nazia raped by a mob. In Bombay, Nazia and Suhail set up The Modern Indian Theatre and reprise their roles as Shakuntala and Dushyant. But the relationship is broken. Suhail leaves. These revelations set in the present also expose Nazia's prickly relationship with her niece; a constant tension that is unravelled towards the end of the play.
This ambitious narrative of old and new inhabits a three-fold staging of a play within a play (dance routines recreating the historical Shakuntala productions), a sub-plot of love doomed (Nazia and Suhail fighting history's ups and downs), and the centrepiece trauma of filial bitterness (Nazia and Ruby in repeated emotional fisticuffs).
Yet, for a purposeful story, which it is, the script is flabby with lines delivered as though they were witticisms than with actual humour. The set, under-realised by junky furniture lays a forced periodization on the script's histories, each of which jostle each other on Prithvi's tiny stage divided into three zones. Without the benefit of sophisticated light changes, the evocation of time shifts is left entirely up to the actors, only some rising to the occasion.
Soni Razdan's Ruby, an inherently unlikable character (for how many will easily warm to a bitter woman), is the play's cathartic centre. It is hard not to draw parallels between the cad Dushyant rejecting a pregnant Shakuntala and Nazia shunning her own daughter. Selective amnesia helms both situations. Dushyant and Nazia both refuse reality by claiming it never happened. In both, the victim is a child. But as Soni Razdan's angry-whiny mode never fully frees the almost childlike grief from under Ruby's adult resentment, the tragic affinity with Shakuntala remains more or less hidden.
As for Priya Karunakaran's role shifting, it was better consigned to someone more fluidly adaptable to variations of locution and mannerism across the whirligig of history. Neha Dubey's young Nazia, however, has just enough of that full-blooded knack suggesting the irascible older Nazia. Sid Makkar fills the testosterone lapse in what is a prodigious field of oestrogen. Though certainly, his Suhail, in a green room showdown with Nazia, where both are in costume as Dushyant and Shakuntala, is also a touching portrait of a man torn between love and misplaced pride. In fact, this break-up scene, overdone with high emotion, nicely dovetails the mythical Shakuntala story and the similar love-anguish of the actors portraying it.
Otherwise, the campy renditions of historical musical theatre featuring Shakuntala, her sakhi, and Dushyant are so boneless - neither good parody, nor faithful replication - as to cause one to slump in one's seat. And what of music? Whoever heard of musical theatre without an exemplary job of the score?
Predictably, Lillete Dubey, with her built-in sexy vocal chords, is the big draw. Unlike the remaining cast of four who absorb ten characters, Dubey has the advantage of devotion to a single role. She can showcase Nazia as a larger than life character, for the most part achieved. Perhaps this is because the audience loves the natural recall of a pugnacious old bird. Were that entirely true, an 80-year old, who was more persuasively elderly yet feisty, might have played the aged Nazia. But Dubey is a long-time theatre luminary. She has a following of sorts that perhaps admires her stage presence in the play, all the more for its improbable coincidence with Nazia's age. Ironically, it is in fast forward mode, in the shoes of a character trying to get one foot out of the grave by pressing rewind that Dubey becomes more effervescent and more beautiful to behold.
Whatever its ugly quirks, it's a good thing the genre of the Grand Dame Noir exists. We get to see more of Dubey. Though it would be far better if it didn't oblige actresses just past 50 to turn into old hags.
*Prajna Desai is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and an academic editor. She was trained as an art and architectural historian and currently teaches history at Rachana Sansad Academy of Architecture, Mumbai.
