And Then One Day: A Memoir (16 page)

Now, the nagging suspicion that I had been kidding myself was fuelled by watching Om’s steady growth from being a modest insecure wallflower into an actor and person of considerable assurance. I, though, was exactly the same arrogant loudmouth I had been when I joined NSD, had found nothing new, had learnt nothing in three years; the thought would hit me like one of Delhi’s hot winds that in these three years I had grown only in my conceit. I hadn’t gotten any better than I had been three years ago. Om without a doubt had, but I being incapable of that kind of genuine humility had instead frittered away the time, falling in and out of love with various women and thinking that was all there was to make life complete. The thought that my time there had been a total waste had to be swallowed. My adolescent boast that ‘I would show the bloody world’ began gradually to transform itself into a resolve to become worthy of the arrogance nature seemed to have bestowed on me in such abundance. If I wanted to survive as an actor I had to bring more than just competence and cleverness to the table and I suspected I didn’t have very much more than those. It was time to learn my job.

The Film and TV Institute of India, Pune was the last place I expected it to happen though, I just needed the ‘passport that would ensure entry into the film world’. No less a person than Mr K. A. Abbas, when I had gone knocking at his door, had assured me that that was exactly what the FTII acting course was.

Professor Taneja walked into class on the first day and launched into his daily ritual of changing from dark glasses to clear ones, briefly drumming two forefingers on the table edge, clearing his throat and going ‘Mmmmm’ for a second as if testing out his voice, and having found it working beginning to speak. That day he barely got to ‘Er... I need someone to...’ before I was on the floor itching to display my magnificence to the rest of the class, ready to do anything he might ask—laugh, cry, mouth magnificent dialogue, get angry, get dejected, make funny faces, stand on my head, roll on the floor; whatever he came up with I could do it. What to my astonishment he did ask me to do was go out of the door and come in again ‘just that, nothing more’ he added, pre-empting the ‘why, what for’ questions. Ah! He wants me to think about it myself, I thought. No problem. In the few seconds before entering I furiously thought about how I could make this entry interesting, assuming that was the purpose. Summoning up the pathetically scant tricks I had from my bag, I ‘made an entry’, deliberately tripping over the doorstep and berating an imaginary person who I had not in fact imagined at all. Barely had I begun when I heard ‘Stop! Shah, you’re not right for this one, sit down. Someone else please.’ Completely mortified, and clueless as to what I’d done wrong, I took my seat while Vikram Mehrotra, a handsome hunk who was not really interested in acting, and who in fact later never worked as an actor, but generously provided me many a breakfast while at the Institute, took my place on the floor and executed Taneja saab’s instructions to perfection. He came in through the door and stood in the middle of the floor not knowing what to do—precisely what was needed to make the point.

Prof T then, taking Vikram’s watch from him, told him to repeat the action exactly, only ‘this time you are coming in to get your watch’, and there was a discernible sense of purpose when Vikram entered this time, no awkwardness or self-consciousness at all; he knew exactly what he had to do—look for his watch, which the Prof had concealed in a drawer. Far from performing ‘exactly the same action’ he was this time actually looking for his watch; he was actually thinking, and looking in places it should reasonably be. BINGO! It made sense to me instantly why I was not right for this exercise. Incapable as an actor of responding to immediate stimulus, I had always needed a map, so to say, and was lost without one.

Here one was expected to wing it, to respond on the spur, so to say; something, which despite dear Srilata’s exhortations during
Marjeeva,
I had not realized was an essential requirement for an actor’s work. The meaning of the word ‘improvise’ began to make sense. After all when in life one threads a needle one doesn’t have a ground plan, so why should one be needed when handling an imaginary needle and thread? So far all I had understood of ‘improvisation’ was two actors each trying to say cleverer things than the other, with the wittier of the two being considered to have ‘improvised well’. It was always just an improvisation of put-downs, each actor trying to outdo the other, paying no heed to creating a situation or a relationship. To make matters worse, we had often in NSD been asked, in improvisation class, to imagine ourselves as characters, the portrayal of which would strain the resources of Mr Daniel Day-Lewis himself. Without even possessing the acting chops to respond convincingly to an imaginary cup of tea, we were asked to believe in complex imaginary situations like being a roadside dweller, a beggar, a thief, or discovering a spouse’s infidelity, being struck by paralysis, warning a crowd about a fire, and so forth. ‘Stay true to the character’ was a constant admonition without any guidance at all towards understanding even the physical characteristics we were asked to represent. We were just told to believe we were these people, we were expected to ‘fully understand’ and represent the character’s behaviour without even being given a context. The Stanislavskian phrases ‘super- objective’ and ‘emotional memory’ and ‘psychological gesture’ were flung around quite a bit without anyone ever explaining them or illustrating what they meant and they were invariably misunderstood.

Now, for a change we were being told to ‘throw characterization out of the window’ and perform each action as ourselves, the attempt being to help us understand our own behaviour and reflexes. More importantly, it began to become clear that when you enter a scene, you are coming from somewhere to somewhere else and unless you know where and why in both cases all you will manage is to attempt a ‘great entry’, the very narcissistic trap I had fallen into and made a habit of. Along the way since then I have managed to extricate myself from this pit of self-absorption. We had been taught at NSD how to stand effectively onstage, how to be bang on cue, how to handle costumes, how to catch the light, how to project the voice; how, in short, to make a good picture. We were made to learn the Five Ws (who, why, what, where, when) by rote like the two-times-two table, but no one had been able to emphasize the importance of applying them, much less bothering to explain how they were to be applied.

What in FTII we were instead being asked to do had the elements of organically incorporating the Five Ws: ‘plan nothing but the intention behind the action’. I had never heard these words at NSD. Prof T went further that day and said, while looking pointedly at me, ‘Some of you have a lot to unlearn.’ The words ‘entry’, ‘exit’, ‘props’, ‘costumes’, ‘settings’, etc. were to be expelled from our vocabulary. Whatever we would perform was to be unplanned (not unthought about though) and, most significantly, as ourselves not as an imaginary character. I was tempted to ask right away what I should do when playing someone different from myself, but desisted from jumping the gun. What had been said so far had made enormous sense and a weak ray of light was peeping through the cracks. I figured I would get some answers in good time.

Mr Taneja himself, after studying under Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio in New York, had returned to India to take over the acting department when the Institute was founded. He was in every way the absolute antithesis of Alkazi: somewhat rotund, with a head of unruly curly hair, cheerful, unfailingly patient and fully inclined to overlook minor disciplinary infractions. Adored as he was by both the current students and the successful ones who often made the pilgrimage to Pune to pay obeisance, I have no idea how seriously he took himself but having your feet touched on a regular basis by the country’s biggest stars must have some effect on a man’s psyche. Taneja saab seemed to take it all with many grains of salt. He seemed distant initially but with time I grew to love him deeply and feel tremendous gratitude for his concern and for opening my mind to what it is possible to learn as an actor.

Watching movies in languages other than Hindi or English, from countries other than England or the US explained to me why I found most of the acting in Indian movies so unbearably false. Compared to the level of understanding of life and of their work those Italian, Polish, Czech, Japanese writers and actors seemed to have, our writing and performing were infantile. The kind of acting I was now witnessing was, I realized, what I had always been after. I had no interest any longer in mastering the craft of running around trees or playing larger-than-life characters. I knew that was not my métier anyway, this kind of acting was.

I began to grapple with figuring out how actors in these mostly European movies could be so watchable and so real at the same time, and found my thoughts veering perilously close to ‘only that which is real is watchable’ which is (not so) obviously untrue, but which took a while to distil into a coherent realization. Laurence Olivier and Toshiro Mifune, for example, are both highly watchable but hardly ‘real’. I thought I could figure out how these two giants did what they did; but how Dustin Hoffman, who I had then seen only in
The Graduate,
or Per Oscarsson, a little-known but truly great Swedish actor, or Jean-Louis Trintignant, the Frenchman, who were also obviously ‘acting’ could, while doing it, appear so completely without artifice boggled my mind. These actors did not seem to be pretending, they seemed to be the characters they were playing, their poise was so utterly appropriate. HOW DID THEY DO IT?? I knew for certain that this was what I wanted to make myself capable of and I had a hunch that what we were being taught at FTII was a baby step towards that. And I had expected to be taught how to lip-synch to mediocre songs! My excitement, to coin a phrase, knew no bounds. I was going to enjoy learning at last, that was quite enough to dispel the not inconsiderable grief of R’s desertion.

This elusive word ‘method’ was beginning to reveal itself at last. All the psychotropia available at reasonable prices then also provided a much-needed refuge from reality, pushing me further into the tunnel of beginning to learn what it is an actor actually does when he acts. This was a thought that, incidentally, had long bothered me; why actors could never be articulate about their work, why they almost always resorted to specious befuddlements: ‘acting is nothing but farting about in disguises’, ‘no job for a grown-up’, ‘just the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing’. Or pseudo-mysticisms: ‘I try to find my centre’, ‘I lose myself in the part’, ‘I become the character and everything just follows’, while (actually not) describing what they do and how they do it. This reluctance to pass on anything but tricks of the trade means that the only thing in the possession of such actors is tricks of the trade. If acting is indeed a craft like a carpenter’s, why do most actors find it impossible to explain how in their work, the wood so to say is sawed into the required shapes and the pieces put together to create. AND more important is the purpose of it all simply to play different roles, to grab eyeballs, to display your wares? ‘Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!’ as Sir Laurence reportedly described it once. In that case to what end? The answer is so glaringly simple that most actors do not confront it ever. But trying to figure out what an actor’s role in the scheme of things really is, and trying to understand the dynamics that go into creating a moment of acting truth has been a long, often dark, sometimes blindingly illuminating, sometimes hopeless sojourn, but I am still in the tunnel and it is my spot. This is where I live. The light at the end of the tunnel is reassuring though, and in the past many torches have been lit along the way.

The term ‘method’ is an Americanism and probably coined in the US by, and as a result of, some of Stanislavsky’s most notable pupils staying on to teach in that country after the historic early-twentieth-century Moscow Art Theatre tour. Stanislavsky himself, it is recorded somewhere, was not an overly gifted actor and therefore it is assumed he felt the need to create or discover for himself a system which did not rely upon cleverness in improvising or an innate ability to entertain, or in ‘seizing the moment’. He wished to uncover a system not dependent on something as indefinable and unpredictable as a ‘good day’ or ‘inborn talent’; a way of approaching acting that was based on accurate human behaviour; a system that would work regardless of audience reaction or of how the actor was feeling that day, one that would point the actor in the right direction, which would be more or less foolproof, a system which could actually be defined and practised.

In a reaction against the kind of shallow theatricality that was the norm in those days, Stanislavsky emphasized what he called ‘psychological truth’ by which he meant accuracy of behaviour, and finding the route to that behaviour by an empathy with the character’s situation and an understanding of his relation to everything around. It was a fortunate accident for everyone that coinciding with, and complementing, Stanislavsky’s research were the efforts of the playwright Anton Chekhov, who too helped break the mould of the ‘larger than life’ characters peopling the stage then and created dramatic works about the aspirations of the less privileged, the common people. The first conscious practitioners of the Stanislavsky system in cinema were probably American actors, or at least they were the ones with the highest profile, and thus became the best known for it. It also became an excuse for many incompetent actors to justify their shoddy work, and the accusations of the ‘bum scratching, nose picking style of acting’, as it was referred to by many detractors soon after, were not entirely misplaced. The psychologically driven style of acting personified by the early Brando very soon degenerated into as codified a manner of expressing as the older, staid, oratorical style. For evidence of the two vastly differing schools of acting, both then at their zenith, one has only to watch Messrs Brando and Gielgud in the same frame in Joseph Mankiewicz’s film
Julius Caesar.