Made it to centre stage

theatre foray

The current trend of the young brigade of actors, both male and female, in the Indian film industry is to establish one’s own film production house as soon as possible. The actors start production, some even go for direction and, of course, acting in their home production. Many have joined this bandwagon in recent times. But Kalki Koechlin has never been a bandwagon hopper. Though she too has started a production house, a theatre company called Little Productions.

“Since the days of my studying drama and theatre in Goldsmiths, University of London, where I also got a chance to work with a theatre company named Theater of Relativity for two years, I have always wanted to have my own theatre group. With Little Productions and my directorial debut play The Living Room, I hope my dreams will come true!” says the actor.

Kalki has made a habit of winning accolades and opting for different subjects and roles since her maiden film Dev.D, which got her the Filmfare award for best supporting actor. Then it was a commercial for Coca Cola with Imran Khan that was awarded the best advertisement at the IPL event. This year, the film Margarita, with a Straw brought her the best actor award at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Bringing in the unusual

So, when it came to her own theatre work, the actor with pixie looks, or as director Dibakar Banerjee of Shanghai fame once said, “She has Grecian beauty,” had to write an unusual story. The Living Room, written and directed by Kalki, is a tribute to death in her own way.

Ask her why she chose ‘death’ as the subject for her debut play and she explains, “Death actually means life. Every one of us on this planet knows that death is inevitable, but even then we all behave as though it would bypass us! We lead a life of happiness, sadness, revenge, anger, nastiness, romance, love and sacrifice. And we all live this with full gusto. My play deals with all these emotions when death comes visiting my protagonist in her living room.”

Kalki’s point is that we all face death from a young age. It may be the loss of one’s pet (Kalki lost her dog at the age of nine), grandparents, some or the other relative or a revered public figure. But life continues despite the loss. “I am very worried about my parents — their ailments, old age, likelihood of their death. I can’t imagine that loss. So I wanted to explore all these emotions in my play,” says the actor who along with films has been active on the theatre circuit.

In fact, she has written and acted in many plays earlier.
For example, Kalki has won the MetroPlus playwright award in 2009 for the play The Skeleton Woman that she has co-written with Prashant Prakash. She has also acted in it. One of her recent plays that made waves is Colour Blind, tackling the subject of personal life of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, which she has written with Dwijottam Bhattacharjee and Manav Kaul. Two other plays are Hamlet the Clown Prince and Trivial Disaster.

Brought up under the influence of Sri Aurobindo of Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Auroville, Puducherry, as her parents were devotees of the saint, Kalki lived and studied in Ooty, Tamil Nadu. She can speak Tamil, English and French fluently. When she came to Mumbai to try her luck in Bollywood, she learnt Hindi. But she writes all her plays in English. Writing comes to her naturally, but she prefers to write dialogues. She has written the script for the film That girl in Yellow Boots with her then husband Anurag Kashyap. But Kalki has an equal liking for both the mediums — theatre and films. “In theatre, we have a live audience and need to deliver instantly. There are no retakes. Audience reaction is instantaneous. If one is good, one gets the cheers, if bad, the jeers. There are so many retakes in films that every shot, every event is picture-perfect. Theatre has its own high. There are no egos here,” says the debutante director.

All for one

Talking about egos, the question is how she tackled the star cast of her play where everyone except Jim Sarbh is older and more experienced in theatre than her. “Everyone — Sheeba Chaddha, Neil Bhoopalam, Tariq Vasudeva and the technical staff — was a professional. And during rehearsals, till the last 10 days, we had discussions and I accepted suggestions and incorporated the best of them. After all, theatre is a collective and a collaborative art, but in the end, it’s the director’s vision and everyone knows it.”
(The play is on at Ranga Shankara)