It’s been nearly half a century since thespian P.C. Ramakrishna first trod the boards of the Museum Theatre. But the lights haven’t dimmed, the curtain hasn’t fallen, the show still goes on and how.
His next production, based on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None , is to be staged in the city this weekend at the same theatre where it all began, “The first play I acted in 1964 was called The Amazing Mister Scuttleboom , a strange play about a pirate who loved children very much. It was directed by a professor at Loyola College called Father Coyle,” he says, nostalgia apparent in his voice (and what a voice!!!). “There is something about the Museum Theatre. It was built by the British and made for drama. It is almost like Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. When I get on to that stage even now, the fifty years suddenly descend on me.”
It has been an interesting journey if a somewhat convoluted one. And if you start at the very beginning, as Julie Andrews once warbled, it began with the sound of music, “I am a professional mridangam player — I even played at the Music Academy,” he says. But though he spent many years on it and trained under stalwarts like Palghat Mani Iyer, he didn’t pursue it after graduating from Loyola College, Chennai. Instead, he joined the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and went on to take a degree in business management. “There wasn’t enough money in music to make it my profession,” he says candidly, “Corporate life was available and I took the easy way out. I worked a 9-5 job and what got me through the day was knowing that I had a rehearsal in the evening.”
In 1969, he was asked by the Principal of Loyola College to direct a production of the Loyola Amateur Dramatics society. The production, The Long and The Short and The Tall, a war play which required an all-male cast, was not in Ramakrishna’s opinion an unqualified success, “I had no concept of direction, at that time. I simply told people what to do and to my horror all of them ended up sounding like me. It was discomfiting,” he says.
Though it would be decades before he would don the director’s hat again, the incident got him noticed by Ammu Joseph of the Madras Players who invited him to come over for a reading of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible . He landed the role, went on to act in almost a 100 plays with the Madras Players and even became its president for a while. And though 45 seems like a long time, the passion hasn’t flagged “It may seem like a lot but to me it went by in a flash. I’ve played a myriad range of characters — some funny, some traumatic. It is wonderful.”
The constant switching of roles from the corporate honcho to the consummate actor was something he lived with till be took voluntary retirement in 1993, choosing to focus completely on theatre. What helped him make that decision was his success in another rather different arena — voiceovers.
“BHEL called me in 1976, asking me to read out a corporate script — it worked for both of us, I am still reading for them. It started as a hobby but by the time I retired the work had become too big and I no longer could do it only over the weekends. I do 30-40 page-long technical scripts — you know it was my voice that landed Chandrayaan on the lunar orbit,” he laughs, talking about his work with ISRO.
And the best thing about his job, “I do it in the day and am free for rehearsals in the evening. I lend my voice to bring home the bacon. There is no money in theatre — we do it only because we are passionate about it,” he says.
One of the earliest newsreaders in English, he says that a stint in AIR and Doordarshan started off his love for the spoken word, “What we did was pioneering — we did a heck of a lot with some very primitive technology. But I am not a lens person really, theatre is my first love.”
Which is why, despite several offers, he chose not to get into the film industry, “Mani Ratnam and his brother were friends socially. And when they knew I had retired they asked me to do a couple of scenes for them.”
He did one scene in the comedy thriller Thiruda Thiruda, played actor Sonali Kulkarni’s father in the romance film May Madham and even shared screen space with actor Vijaykanth but he chose not to continue with it, “Had I decided that film was my medium, I could have gone on to do countless ones. People wanted me left, right and centre. Most Tamil heroines are imports from the North and they needed men who didn’t look very Dravidian to play their fathers. I would have been a good fit but I simply wasn’t taken over by the medium.”
Going back to the medium he loves — theatre, “I did a lot of American and European theatre when I started — Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams. The 1970s saw a lot of Indian writing being available for theatre and we capitalised on it.”
In fact, both the plays he has directed have decidedly Indian themes, “My seminal production Water , based on Komal Swaminathan’s Thanner Thaneer , was a huge success. I did it, because no one else would and the play had to be done.”
Honour his next play, based on the Indian Army was done because, “I wanted to celebrate the Indian armed forces,” he says adding, “I really enjoyed these two but I am basically an actor.”
Art borrows from life, life is shaped by art. Ramakrishna agrees, “You simply can’t switch off like that. To play a role you have to become another person, else you are only playing at it. You have to learn lessons from life.”
