During the press drive for his latest play, Aurat! Aurat!! Aurat!!! (exclamations theirs), earlier this month, Naseeruddin Shah spoke of how the script of Gabriel Emanuel’s Einstein gathered dust in his drawer for ten years, before he “pulled it out and did it.” Which is all very well, because not only did that interim period allow him to more closely approach the age of the nuclear scientist in the piece (all of 70 years to Shah’s 64 at the time of the premiere in 2014), but also provided us an opportunity to watch him sink his teeth into a role with sufficient dramatic meat for an actor of his peerless vintage. Shah’s outing with Florian Zeller’s The Father last year demonstrates how he continues to seek out worthy vehicles for his talent, even if parts for senior thespians are rather thin on the ground. For Emanuel, whose play has been performed prolifically across the world since 1985, it was one of the best stagings of Einstein ever, and he even attended a performance in Mumbai's Prithvi Theatre, which he describes as a ‘rare and magical evening’ in a recent interview.
Now Emanuel is back in India with a new solo play, Mark Twain: Live in Bombay! , which has been produced by the Kolkata-based Padatik and Rikh, and features Vinay Sharma (who has directed the piece as well) in the title character of the American writer and humourist. Although highly beloved in India for his writings on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, one of the lesser known episodes from Twain’s life is possibly his 1896 lecture tour of India. That excursion has been extensively documented in his travelogue, Following The Equator , and in Richard Zack’s Chasing the Last Laugh , both tomes including the choicest of anecdotes from this wholly gratifying ‘misadventure’ in the subcontinent, some of which have found their way into Emanuel’s manuscript. Of course, the playwright has embarked on a ‘re-imagining’ by placing his subject squarely on the rostrum at Bombay’s Novelty Theatre, a thriving enterprise in Grant Road in those days, and allowing us to actually attend one of those lectures, after a kind.
There have, of course, been several stage works on Mark Twain, including a West End production featuring Val Kilmer, titled Citizen Twain (a riff on the Orson Welles classic). It was also a one-man show, which Kilmer has made into a film as well. Emanuel’s version follows the trope that has powered works in which Twain is placed at the centre of proceedings. He is invariably a public speaker, and a brilliant raconteur at that, a trail of smoke follows him, everything is white and pristine, and his words bristle with his characteristic acerbic wit. It might help that Sharma has a moustache to rival Twain. Emanuel’s history with the play began with his writing another piece, Mark Twain in the Holy Land , on the writer’s visit to Palestine in 1867. That project, due to open in Jerusalem, fell through when the lead actor found himself suddenly unavailable. His new script contains much of the same material.
Fortuitously for those weaned on Twain's ‘young adult’ classics, there are excerpts from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , including stories about Huck’s father and his times with the liberated slave, Jim. Having read the script, it is impossible not to discern a poignancy to the Twain we encounter through his own words, and in the hands of an experienced actor (that Sharma indubitably is), much of it could make for an engrossing evening.
In other news, in a rare occurrence for a Rehaan Engineer project, Molly Sweeney will be staged in Mumbai, after an opening run last year in Delhi. Directed by the reclusive maverick, and featuring Vidushi Mehra, Farhad Colabavala and Samar Sarila, it is a chillingly melancholic two-act play by Brian Friel. It is a project close to Engineer’s heart, and he had directed and acted in a production of it back in 2004, alongside Shernaz Patel and Vijay Crishna. First performed in 1994 in Dublin, it is one of several Friel plays set in the fictional town of Ballybeg. Molly has been blind since infancy, and is now undergoing a surgery to restore her sight. Her husband and her surgeon are the other characters in this tight three-hander performed relentlessly as three monologues. Engineer is no stranger to experimentation, even in his salad days, so taking up a play with a reputation of being ‘anti-theatrical’ is par for the course. For once, the venue’s advisory, “We request you to bring warm clothes as it gets chilly inside the Black Box as temperatures need to be controlled at optimum levels as per technical requirements,” seems strangely appropriate.
