At the very end of a theatrical performance, when the house lights come on, the ensemble gathers for a final communal salutation, beholden to their new-found admirers. At that moment, each performer drops a mask or whatever it was that they were inhabiting. It’s a quick flicker of a moment, and if you blink you’ll miss this discarding of themselves as they were, and the moulting into who they are. One of the pleasures of an outing to an intimate venue like Prithvi Theatre, is discovering these ephemeral moments, these changes in each actor. Where there was once perfectly crafted humility on stage there is now pride; ersatz arrogance is suddenly strangely acquiescent, almost shy. A clown acquires gravitas, a pallid ghost is infused with the vigour of life replete with outstretched countenance and twinkling eyes, even the most wooden lot, who may have been miserable on stage, acquire stature. The curtain call is indeed something very special.
Business as usual
In Makrand Deshpande’s Karodo Mein Ek , Ayesha Reza Mishra plays a stoic woman of the house, the balm to the lacerated lives of her close ones. At a particular performance at Prithvi, the play had overshot its advertised running time, heading well into a third hour, and the first bell for the next performance had already been sounded outside. Deshpande’s plays can drain an actor of her resources, and the curtain call reveals the toll it has taken on both Reza Mishra and her character. The theatre is air-conditioned, but the adrenaline of live performance ensures that the actors are completely drenched in sweat. At that moment, she is like the wife of a magician who’s lent herself to a macabre body-sawing ritual, and when her dismembered form is made whole again, she must stand, still drugged and dazed, and wave at the audience. Reza Mishra musters up a faint smile at the applause certainly, but as we hear the second bell ringing outside, we realise that within a matter of minutes, the actors must all return for yet another three hours of blood-letting.
In his play, Walking to The Sun , Sunil Shanbag stages Rabindranath Tagore’s Dak Ghar , in which a little boy dies after a prolonged battle with terminal illness, and the actors walk tenderly to the edge of the makeshift stage and bow. Many in the Prithvi audience clamber to their feet for an ovation, almost as if an internal auto-cue register has been sounded. They sit down quickly again, chastened, when they realise it’s only the play within the play that has ended. The play itself will move to a more chilling denouement, as the children of the Krakow ghetto who were staging the Tagore play, are led to a gas chamber in Treblinka. Within the play, that ‘curtain call transformation’ is breathtakingly achieved, as garrulous old men take off their wigs and false moustaches to suddenly become child actors — voiceless underlings eager for appreciation, vulnerable even if they have no idea of what lies in wait. An unexpected cameo is delivered by Prithvi Theatre’s resident moth, as it flutters obliviously over the actors during an affecting moment, an unintended signifier perhaps for the lives that will be snuffed out. For attention-deficit audiences the play delivers no easy pay-offs, no cheap thrills; only a kind of timeless elegance with the power to transform. There is no standing ovation when the play actually ends.
Dramatic delight
Of course, curtain calls at Prithvi Theatre can be quick, nifty affairs. The cast disappears into the wings as breathlessly, as they arrive. When you have a first show, the director may attend the mêlée with his people-shy technicians. He may introduce each member of the cast, although their names can scarcely be heard above the din. He may read out a thank-you note. Some have made a ritual of this. Ekjute shows invariably ended with Nadira Zaheer Babbar sauntering on to stage breaking into what seemed to be an impromptu jig, to a well-timed chorus of claps and cheers from her cast. In the Akvarious grand ensembles of the past, like All About My Mother or Rafta Rafta , the cast begin to suddenly shake a leg to uptempo beats in the very last scene. The breaking of character en masse can be disconcerting for a moment, before you are taken in by the joie de vivre. This festivity on display lulls audiences into a sense that they have experienced a dose of vital, alive theatre, and now they are allowed to be part of it, as actors goad them to lift their arms into the air in a wave of compulsive applause.
“The curtain call is a second performance in which the audience performs, and gets back at the actors,” director Atul Kumar once told me. For his Piya Behroopiya , which opened at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre before its Indian run, he had to train his team in the intricacies of the curtain call as they would encounter it in London. There, when a troupe leaves the stage, and the clapping continues unabated, they must return. Then leave again, and then again be summoned back by the applause. At Prithvi, applause is much more black and white. Standing ovations are given away for free. To remain seated while so many others are scrambling to get to their feet, becomes a value judgement of sorts, even if you may merely be reserving a certain kind of acclaim for only the best performances. This is why the cast cannot return for a second curtain call, or a third, or a fourth. The audience has already played its cards, there is nothing more to be demonstrated.
This is a modified extract from an essay published in the Indian Council for Cultural Relations' journal, India Horizons Quarterly
