After over the two decades of staging Dear Liar , actor Naseeruddin Shah says, there are always “those who come expecting a comedy and go away disappointed. Somehow the title evokes it.” Perhaps they think, he guesses, “the guy must be lying all the time and the woman will catch him out.”
There are many funny moments in Jerome Kilty’s play based on the 40-year correspondence between Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and English actor Mrs. Patrick Campbell, but also the bittersweet notes of real life. It’s the ideas in the play that really engage the audience, say Shah and his wife, actor Ratna Pathak Shah, who will bring the classic back on stage this week.
“It’s not love as we know it, as mushy romance,” Pathak Shah says, “It’s a relationship of ideas, of people who could hold these enormous emotions and ideas inside them.” When the relationship started, at the end of the 19th century, Campbell was already a renowned stage actress and Shaw a theatre and music critic beginning his career as a playwright. Both were married; Shaw said his love affairs were his wife’s “greatest amusement”.
Sparkling missives
The letters bristle with wit and flirtation, but also with the tragedy of the passing years, as Shaw’s mother dies and Campbell loses her son in the First World War. Shaw wrote one of his most famous characters, Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion , for Campbell, who first played the role in 1914, the year of her second marriage.
The play, about the complex relationship between a phonetics professor and a Cockney flowergirl, was to bring them both great fame, though the frequency of the letters lessened afterwards.
When Campbell died, impoverished, in France in 1940, Shaw quietly paid for her funeral. When he died a decade later, his will allowed for the publication of their letters for the financial benefit of Campbell’s great-grandchildren.
It was a complicated relationship between two egotists; “very passionate, very intense, very sniping,” Pathak Shah says, “full of great regard and love for each other and for themselves.”
The Dubey touch
Shah calls the play “a parting gift” from Satyadev Dubey, the great director and enfant terrible of the Indian stage.
Dubey considered Shaw to be the greatest playwright, Shah says, and had “tremendous admiration for Stella Campbell, who could match him at his game of wits. No one else in the world probably could.”
Dubey had been hunting for the right actors for a long time, at one point even considering Amitabh Bachchan and Zeenat Aman. “Thank god he didn’t or it would never have fallen to our lot,” Shah says with a chuckle. They met at the shooting of Shah’s first film Nishant . Shah joined Mohan Agashe in an impromptu singing of Doolittle’s ‘All I Want is a Room Somewhere’ from My Fair Lady , the film version of Pygmalion , prompting him to follow it up with the professor’s, “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” Dubey had found his lead, whom he would later direct in two of Shaw’s plays ( Don Juan in Hell and Village Wooing ).
Dubey brought his understanding of mise-en-scène and staging to the play, Pathak Shah says. “It’s not easy to make a letter sound like the spoken word.”
Unlike his usual practice, Dubey designed the set for Dear Liar before staging the action. It was spare and symmetrical: two doors, two windows, two portraits. It’s a set that has had to be remade several times because of the lack of proper godowns in the city; most recently for this week’s show.
Kilty’s script doesn’t describe a set and asks the actors to not resemble their characters. “There’s a good reason,” Shah says, The play spans decades in its character’s lives: “If we were to try and resemble these two people physically, we’d do nothing but change our make-up for two hours.”
The play begins with the actors introducing themselves and their characters; Dubey had them stand behind the windows and remove the portraits, “a beautiful way to convey that these actors have now become these people,” says Shah.
It was a move that had an unexpected impact on the actors. Despite the two-hour runtime, playing Dear Liar was “not emotionally exhausting because we don’t have to be those characters all the time,” Shah says. In fact, being kept at a remove from his role had altered his idea of how theatre should be done. “The audience always knows they are in a theatre so it is more important to emphasise that this is a play you’re watching, with actors playing roles,” Shah says, “It makes our job doubly challenging, and also gives us a sense of respite between scenes.” For Pathak Shah, it gives her a rare chance to sit back and appreciate Shah’s performance while onstage without thinking about how her character would respond.
The staging also has a subtle slice of history: Shah’s costume is the same suit worn by Geoffrey Kendal in the production of the play for his Shakespeareana Company, which toured India in the 1940s and 50s. The costume his co-star, wife Laura Kendal, wore proved ill-fitting for Pathak Shah, who got hers designed by Gavin Miguel.
Dramatic relationships
The actors say their understanding of the play has grown with the years, with a key change suggested by their son who watched it as a child. “Imaad and a friend of ours saw it at a time when we thought we were doing it extremely well,” Shah says. Both say they thought the two were quarrelling far too much onstage. “Imaad didn’t like to see his parents quarrelling, but our friend said that these people are so intellectual that they won’t be haggling, their quarrelling would be of a much more cerebral level.” Also, Shah adds, Shaw would not have been the dominating character he’d imagined him as at the beginning of the relationship, given that Campbell was a huge star.
While Campbell’s faith in herself propelled her to be an actor-manager in a male-dominated system, Pathak Shah also observed that her story told of the folly actors often make of perceiving plays as starring vehicles for themselves; “one of the first areas of discord” for the pair. Dear Liar was also a comment on the shelf-life of show business; Campbell’s eventual decline highlighted “the dilemma of the forgotten artist,” Shah says.
Shah sees a similarity with the platonic relationship between writers Ismat Chugtai and Saadat Hasan Manto, both of whose works Shah has directed. Shah says “it was Manto who died in penury, and they were not lovers, they had a huge admiration for each other and a hugely argumentative relationship.”
Dear Liarwill be staged on July 8 at 7.30 p.m. at St. Andrews Auditorium, Bandra
Saumya Ancheri is Assistant Web Editor for National Geographic Traveller India
It’s a relationship of ideas, of people who could hold these enormous emotions and ideas inside them
Ratna Pathak Shah
