PLAY MATES Thespian alert

Naseeruddin Shah and Samuel Beckett are an unbeatable combination

    Like his selection of films, Naseeruddin Shah’s choice of plays — that he does with his group, Motley — is also unpredictable. But audiences love to see him on stage, so every play he appears in gets ’em flocking to the theatre. His last play, A Walk In The Woods (with Rajit Kapoor, directed by Ratna Pathak Shah) is a sell-out, but it does contain popular elements. His latest, Samuel Beckett’s First Love (a short story converted to a theatrical piece) is an unusual choice. A dark piece about a misogynistic man, who lives on a park bench after being thrown out of the family home, it is as funny as it is disturbing. The tramp-like man is given shelter by a hooker, and he accepts her largesse as it were his due and lets her serve him as he lolls on a couch. That he might be in love with her is indicated in a comic and yucky scene in which he writes her name in cowpat and licks his finger.
    Shah played the creepy guy with an irresistible charm, that had audiences riveted for 90 minutes, studded with many laugh-out-loud
moments. So many of them had travelled long distances to NCPA’s Godrej Theatre to see him, and were rewarded with undiluted Beckett — sardonic, witty, honest and nasty. What they didn’t know was that Shah rehearsed meticulously and performed in spite of a painful back, because he had committed to the show for the Centrestage Festival. That standing ovation was richly deserved.
   
The evening was redolent of nostalgia and that special togetherness that only the theatre community can manage. The occasion was the presentation of Thespo’s Lifetime Achievement Award to Burjor and Ruby Patel. They have been away from the Mumbai stage since 1988, when they moved to Dubai, and only returned last year with the review, Laughter In The House; but so strong — legendary, actually — is their reputation that the mostly young crowd (most not even born when the Patels were ruling Mumbai’s English and Gujarati theatre) gave a long, standing ovation. Now, there should be vociferous demands for a proper comeback. Maybe with daughter Shernaz Patel co-starring — she is a proper chip of the ol’ block.
   
Mahabanoo Mody Kotwal and her son Kaizaad are busy with a new project with Eve Ensler (of The Vagina Monologues fame), but before that are setting a kind of performance record. Their Poor Box group is doing eight shows of a children's musical, The Magic of Christmas, including one for underprivileged children from six NGOs.
    The cast and crew from this production are also doing three shows of A Merry Broadway Christmas, which has lots of popular Christmas songs and carols along with other pop and Broadway standards. The show also has loads of audience interaction, comedy, sing-alongs and dances by Longinus Fernandez. “So, that is 11 shows in four days,” says Kaizaad, adding, “and over all this month, Poor Box Productions will have done 24 shows, including The Vagina Monologues. We are so blessed!”

Naseeruddin Shah in a still from First Love