Do mavericks and iconoclasts have guardian angels? Naseeruddin Shah admits in And Then One Day that he has one. And in the course of the book, we feel that Shah has been the blue-eyed boy of the angel. Not because of his numerous acting achievements but because he has been spared the burden of superlatives that come with such achievements, yet created his niche.
His own persona being devoid of any stardom, it is a certain delectable effortlessness that gives Shah the ability to be the enfant terrible in his memoir without having apprehensions about ruffling any feathers. When he invokes the Polish theatre legend Jerzy Grotowski to say that “our poverty of resources should be our strength”, isn’t he giving a glimpse into his own thought process — referring to his lack of faux -modesty, to his own approach to acting which is devoid of many embellishments? Isn’t his ability to provoke and at the same time make an observer reflect through his writing a product of this weltanschauung ?
And isn’t this poverty one of the factors that give him the complete freedom to experiment, not just with his acting but also with his memoir?
Written during quieter moments of contemplation amidst the cacophony of shooting schedules, And Then One Day is among the more honest, the most left-field and, in many ways, the most astringent of memoirs written by an actor so far. It is an account of Shah’s experiments with truth, his journal of self-discovery.
And it is a meditation on how Shah wrestles with his own alter-egos to find his place in the arena of acting, that of his search for an “acting truth” or “psychological truth”, as he puts in different places. Though he doesn’t exactly consider himself a ‘method actor’, discovery of a suitable ‘method’ to approach acting is the defining leitmotif of this book.
Shah questions the way most performers relate to and explain their acting when he asks, “If acting is indeed a craft like a carpenter’s, why do most actors find it impossible to explain how in their work, the wood so to say is sawed into the required shapes and the pieces put together to create?”
Finding answers in the modus vivendi of Russian acting pioneer Constantin Stanislavsky, Shah wants to construct a system which can actually be defined and practised. It has to be based not on escapist fantasies but accurate human behaviour, one that would be foolproof and would work regardless of whether the actor is “having a good day” or is able to “seize the moment”.
The book traces the journey of Shah’s wandering soul — through its tribulations, peccadilloes and trysts with different professions — before finding its abode in the arena of acting but still being largely restless in its ever-expanding comfort zone.
Through this journey, the “sense of wonder” he felt when he watched his first stage performance as a child stays alive, making sure that he doesn’t take either his successes or failures too seriously.
Shah is brutally honest when he says that he was “bestowed by nature with arrogance”, and that too “in abundance”. However, he is also humble to admit that his success was not entirely about his talent or his efforts; it was also about his being in the right place at the right time. And that he didn’t choose art films, they chose him, with directors like Shyam Benegal creating the kind of cinema he enjoyed doing, aiding him in finding his “spot”.
Apart from the places where Shah experiences his moments of acting truth — for instance after working on Edward Albee’s play ‘Zoo story’ when he feels in complete control of his acting — the book is at its most inspirational when he talks of actors and performances that acted as his inspiration. These are ones whose excellence on screen he could aspire to match.
The first person is a certain obscure street performer who planted the seeds of wonder in his mind when he was a child; the second, and the one he is most reverential toward, is ‘Shakespeare Wallah’ Geoffrey Kendal. He also admires Shammi Kapoor for his dancing and, in a rather unselfconscious manner, Dara Singh for his machismo. Then there is Spencer Tracy, whose ordinary looks in The Old Man and the Sea make Shah believe that appearances won’t be a handicap when it comes to making his intensity felt as an actor.
Shah’s acting approach helps him while representing realism but lets him down when it comes to the make-believe stuff. And after spells of frustration doing such ‘commercial cinema’, he experiences satisfaction while shooting for auteur-driven films like Sparsh and Masoom . We get an impression that Shah enjoys his acting the most when the director believes in his own vision and has a definite roadmap — like in the case of Sai Paranjape and Shekhar Kapur for the above-mentioned films.
Taking inspiration from the likes of Stanislavsky and Anton Chekhov, Shah aspires not for showmanship but “accuracy of behaviour” by trying to empathise not just with the character the plays but with the situation as a whole and by making an attempt to understand the character’s position in the larger scheme of things.
Hence, right from his early acting days, he tries locating himself as an element in the whole idea rather than an enigma too big for the script to handle. And his desire, as a recalcitrant recluse, to relate to ‘this whole’ in his personal and professional lives is what gives And Then One Day its lifeblood.
