Sitting in the lap of Himalayas with the backdrop of setting sun, veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah opened up on his first love – theatre. “Theatre is only a means of communication in which there should be a storyteller and a listener. Place does not matter as long as you have a good script and that can be achieved in smaller places like hill stations as well where there are no big auditoriums. Enthusiasts should not wait for a big producer who will allow them to mount a play like Mughal-E-Azam. One should start telling stories, which are close to one's heart,” said Shah in a select media interaction on the sidelines of Dharamshala International Film Festival-2016.
Despite his success as an actor in films, Shah calls theatre his true and eternal love. His production company Motley Productions has produced several plays. But as a creative person he was not enthused by the depiction of human life. “It is more of a spectacle than an experience,” he lamented and offered a reason for it. “From at least as far back as 1890, the Parsi theatre companies staged adaptations of the foreign works in Hindi, Marathi, Urdu and Gujarati at playhouses. When the silent films were taken over by talkies, a gulf was created as foreign artists were not able to continue in films due to the use of indigenous languages like Urdu. The demand of the industry were filled by artists from theatre who came into film industry along with the crew making the films as filmed drama on stage,” remarked Shah as he traced the journey of Hindi cinema.
Eventually, the melodrama of the Parsi theatre seeped into Hindi cinema although Parsi theatre declined in the 1930s. “That gulf is still not filled as Bollywood still follows that Parsi play formula of the clichés, narrative structure along with songs at odd timings due to which playwriting and screenplay writing has not evolved in India as much as it should have,” reflected Naseer on the lack of contemporary writing and the need to cut down on the frills of dramatisation.
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He is positive towards the change which the new actors and filmmakers are bringing into cinema but states its celebration was premature as the phenomenon had yet to reach its peak. “This present phase is exciting. It is similar to the time when in 1970s new directors like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Saeed Mirza were bringing change and Satyajit Ray was at his peak but ultimately nothing concrete crystallised in the following decades. It will be premature to celebrate it now as the audience is still addicted to the rubbish which they were being served for decades and they will take time to change their watching pattern,” said Shah . He praised that there were more avenues for actors due to availability of various new mediums. “New talent have much more avenues compared to the times when actors like Shabana, Om Puri and I started their careers. We had option of either working on stage or act in Doordarshan serials for a measly amount or wait for something to come,” quipped Naseer He was happy that the line between different mediums were blurring and new actors were working in different forms of storytelling including the digital format. “I do not think that mediums are different to each other as every medium has its own difficulty and confronting those difficulties makes an actor more experienced thereby sharpens his or her skill as an actor," reflected Naseer.