Between a film shoot in Shimla, a personal tragedy, rehearsals and performances of his new play Hamlet-The Clown Prince, actor Vinay Pathak talks on the phone like someone who has travelled a lot, is exhausted but knows he has miles to go before there will be a snatch of silence. He wants to tick off the small boxes before that. Like talking to us about life on the stage and the things that shape and fuel actors.
Imprints of a memory
Pathak’s first memory of ‘entertainment’ or a ‘performance’ so to speak was not cinematic. It was the staged spectacle within a circus dome that both terrified him and captured his imagination. Decades later while performing in the play, The Blue Mug, he would revisit the ‘memory’ that still wears a clown’s face. Even though mainstream formulaic films like Jyoti Bane Jwala entertained the generation growing up in the seventies and eighties, Vinay remembers the wonder years for many other reasons. The morning shows of black-and-white films for instance. He remembers being enchanted by Bimal Roy classics like Madhumati and Bandini.
“I was taken by the beauty of words, light, music, movement,” he says.
How memories shape who we are
His subliminal connection with the clown and with cinema is now manifesting in his work. He plays the protagonist of Hamlet-The Clown Prince and performed in Bangalore at Opus on August 1. In his films, he often plays characters who have a fundamental innocence and simplicity like the time he grew up in. He says, “Whoever we are is derived from our childhood.” His father worked in the police and yet in the middle of all the violence and criminality he dealt with on a daily basis, he would come home with a Parveen Sultana LP! “Music was a major part of my life..as was literature. We had all the classics at home…and all the greats, from Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare to H G Wells to many other famous writers. When I started to read, I grew more and more fascinated with what I discovered,” he shares. He discovered that the world was about many things and not just about how he looked at it. The prism like perspective now lights up his performances.
He did not begin his adult life thinking he was going to be an actor. It was serendipitous. He was a business school student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook when he saw Equus (a play by Peter Shaffer). He says, “This was the first ever professional play I watched and it turned me upside down. I was instantly fascinated by the world I saw being created on stage and I needed to be a part of this world. But there was so much I didn’t know.” He jumped academic courses and the rest is a story like no other.
He does not think much about how far he has come though, and says, “It is a melodramatic indulgence and I stay away from it. One does look back…but not to think about the journey as an accomplishment. I am still learning. Before every show, I still get butterflies in the stomach. I still feel fear, ripe joy, nervousness…it is like a drug.”
Of life, death and Shakespeare
It is not the ideal time for Vinay to be playing Hamlet. He lost his father a few days ago and it is going to be tough to perform the grieving son on stage. He says, “I am not superstitious but I did Nothing Like Lear when I was already a father of two daughters and it is bizarre that while doing Hamlet-The Clown Prince, I lost my father. I have done about three shows but now when I perform it, I will see other aspects and address things that were not visible earlier. I don’t yet know what that will be like.” He adds that though Hamlet’s conflicts are very specific and unique to his story, as an actor, there will now be a personal element to the interpretation.
For him, the magic of theatre is that, “Everytime you perform, you clean the slate but still something new gets imprinted.” He still feels at a ‘nascent stage’ with Hamlet though and says, “I still have to get to all the layers. Theatre has a certain contextual time and space but Hamlet still has a huge contemporary impact.” Not just on those who watch the play but on him too as an actor. And because Atul Kumar owned all of the quirkiness of Hamlet when he reinterpreted the tragic hero as a Clown Prince, he feels both inspired and blessed to replay the part. “I feel like the luckiest bugger in the world that I got to do two parts (Nothing Like Lear and Hamlet). Atul had already played brilliantly. Somehow, everything I have ever done in theatre has been connected with him and Rajat Kapoor. Atul’s interpretation of both Lear and Hamlet has been the most astounding piece of theatre I have seen. It is humbling to interpret it differently,” he says.
On director and friend Rajat Kapoor
“Working with friends is not at all difficult,” he says and adds, “This is such a cliched understanding of how relationships, creative and personal work. There is an intense understanding between us even though we are not alike at all. We feed off each other’s company and creative space. It has been a privilege to bring his vision to life because he really is a wonderful visionary. It has been a huge privilege to have him by my side as a director, co-actor, family and friend.”
On Bangalore
Atul, Rajat and Vinay connect Bangalore instantly with Ranga Shankara and the space it has created for writers, performers and theatre lovers. Vinay says, “Much before it was built, Arundhati (Nag) took us to the site and I can’t tell you…. it was such a pregnant moment. We were here for the opening of Ranga Shankara and every play that we do is first premiered at Prithvi (Mumbai) and then we bring it here…it is like a ritual now.”
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Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.