Scherazade Kaikobad Actor / Director [English Theatre ]
Which is the last best play you saw and why?
This is not the last best play I saw, but it�s one that keeps coming back to haunt me � GOSPELS OF CHILDHOOD by the Polish group Teatr Zar. I can�t tell you what it was about, but I�ll tell you what it did. It made me leave the theatre hunting for a dark corner in which to crouch, clutch my sides and howl. I never found it. There were too many people hunting for dark corners that night.
Your favourite adda to see a play...
In Mumbai? Hmm� I don�t know. As far as addas go, there�s always good ol fav, Prithvi, where the practice of theatre and its reception has been nurtured in a very warm and welcoming environment (most often, barring the regular complaint that the old-timers hog the space, or the other extreme, that the kiddies have taken over, or that the food is not up to the mark). But off late I�ve increasingly been feeling that the architecture of the space and the way in which generations of practitioners and audiences have consciously and unconsciously been cultivated over the years, is a tad bit circumscribed. There�s only so much that that space can allow, in terms of the kinds of theatres that can happen there; and I often dream of productions that I don�t see being staged there. Now you may call me silly and argue that it is not a space that�s involved in the actual process of building and rehearsing plays, and that it cannot be held responsible for the kind of works that we get to see there, and that it simply brings together groups that have plays and audiences that want to watch them. On the outside, that�s how it might appear, but anyone who wants to believe that is only trying to kid themselves. If you are a theatre practitioner then space is an integral part of how you shape your plays, whether consciously or unconsciously; and if you are also a Mumbai-ite of this generation, then the odds are that the space of Prithvi has seeped into your theatre dna more so than other performance spaces in Mumbai, and that it affects the kind of work you do. That being said, though, I must confess that there�s a particular performance that I�ve been dying to stage in the greenroom upstairs. Maybe I should book now so that I�ll get to do it sometime in the distant future�
Your favourite playwright
Ok, this is going to raise some ire in certain quarters� but someone who�s been a die-hard fan of the �word� is on the brink of conversion. Don�t get me wrong � I still love to curl up with a BEGUM BARVE or someone who can utter �Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua�it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt� it is established as hereinafter but not so fast��; but that�s bedtime reading, or for exercises in how to characterize or not to characterize. What I�m more interested in at the moment is gaps, more gaps than those between quaquaquaqua, gaps that I could fill before/with an audience, or better still leave as gaps. Sometimes, devised pieces or other sorts of text suit this purpose much better; but they can be very tricky and need to be handled with care, or else content can go for a toss and you�re left with the shell of a form.
The most hilarious play you have seen...
Oh God, I hate this question! People think I�m mad when I talk about a certain production of Pinter�s THE BIRTHDAY PARTY that made me laugh in a blackout, which was the only time I cold relieve myself.
A play, which is over-hyped...
Ok, I�m going to keep my mouth shut least I shove a foot into it�
An important play (but ignored)
I don�t think that happens- that a play is important and stays ignored. While some work or the other is always been rescued from oblivion or saved from obscurity (after all this business of rescuing and of ascribing importance to rescued works is an important part of how cultures are defined), maybe we�re too small a fraternity for anything to go completely unnoticed.
A passage from an important play that you can recite...
Oh God, that�s another one I hate� why do people presume that if you�ve read something you like or done a role that�s impacted you, you can dish out its dialogues on demand?!... But if you insist, here�s a fragment that scares me� �tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow,�� I hope I never have to find out what it means in my life apart from the stage.
A play that changed your perception about theatre...
There are a couple but I�ll mention two, mostly for their beauty in leaving things unsaid and being all the more powerful for that � MUAR� by Marina Quesada and Natalia Lopez from Argentina, and KIOSK by Arica from Japan. In different ways, both are a bit Becketian, a bit like quaquaquaqua but with just 5 % the number of words (in the case of the former) or completely without words (in the case of the latter), and both were damn good pieces of theatre. Moral of the story?���������ok, it�s silly to draw up equations between the number of words in the text and the quality of the piece, but the fact is that there can also be so much more to theatre than a strong written script and good delivery of text.
(PS: This was just my little tirade against those who come out of a theatre and drawl �But where was the story?� or �What were they trying to say?�)
How do you regard the Mumbai theatre scene?
I�ve just got back to the city after a couple of years so it would be presumptuous to say anything. But I�ve been twice to the NCPA since (once for a lec-dem on a Telugu devadasi dance tradition, and once for a talk on a piece of performance-cum-installation art�.ok and once more for an evening of theatre that was just too insulting to sit through, so I had to walk out halfway). But I�ve decided that in the interest of my family who are not used to having fits of rage thrown their way, I should stay away from that place. I�ll just have to content myself with drawing marks on printouts of their online calendar over all the black days at the NCPA Experimental theatre.
If you have ever been a part of a theatre production/s, can you recall an event that was insightful, significant or simply humorous?
A couple of months ago, I was pitted very forcefully against an issue that I�d only confronted in a distant theoretical way before. I was travelling through the interiors of Goa with a fellow actor and a director to prepare for a production based on illegal mining in the region. Apart from the fact that for probably the first time in my life I was literally afraid of fellow human beings and feared for my life and limbs (may be I was just a little paranoid with meeting people who�d been injured or hearing tales of those that had been bumped off), what really threw me off was when the son of someone on whose experience I based my piece said that what we were doing would be entirely meaningless unless it changed something in Goa. That really threw me off. I don�t know why it did. I know I should have been prepared for it, but I don�t know why I wasn�t. With all due respect to all our wonderful traditions of street theatre and activist theatre, and�well, various other kinds of theatre, all of which have their own place and purpose in the scheme of things, I don�t enjoy being preached to and I hope I return the courtesy. But till date, I don�t know what is it that I�m doing or should be doing with that production. And then I wonder, what is it that I�m doing with theatre? Or should I even be talking in terms of such �doing�? I don�t know. Maybe I have to find a different vocabulary�"
Scherazade Kaikobad
Which is the last best play you saw and why?
