Book Review and Tales of Stage Fright

Coincidently, have been coming across a lot of emotions about theatre in the books I have been reading nowadays. So I thought I’ll share it here. The first one I am reading is this autobiography called “White Cargo” by Felicity Kendall. For the uninitiated, Felicity is one of Britain’s most successful actors and although I know of her only as a player in Shakespeare wallah (the theatre group and the subsequent movie), she has worked with a whole range of contemporary playwrights and in TV serials as well.

I was introduced to stories of Shakespeare wallah really early in life – much before I made a backdoor entry into Players (that’s a different story all together and I would refrain from launching onto some personal memorabilia and bore you all to death). My father, who went to an anglicized school in the hills, got his theater “calling” at age 17 and decided that he has to join Shakespeare wallah – the only theater group that did English theatre at a commercial level those days (1950-60). He wasn’t allowed to but his unattained dream destination haunts him even today and we get to hear about it periodically.

Shakespeare wallah was a play group that did Shakespeare plays (obviously) all over India and Britain since the 1940s. The main chaps were Geoffrey Kendal, his wife Laura, a changing group of actors of various ages and nationality (one of them being Shashi Kapoor who later married Geoffrey’s elder daughter Jennifer). Geoffrey’s younger daughter Felicity started writing White Cargo at her father’s bedside as he lay paralysed after a stroke and is a really beautiful book on theater, travels, India through the eyes of a non-firangi firang (a not so foreign foreigner) and, ofcourse, a father-daughter relationship. Even if your passions in life don’t exactly coincide with the travel, theater, travel-writing and relationships (mine do), it’s worth a read. If I had to write a book, (and if I was a Felicity not Sudo phish and people wanted to publish that book) it would be on a similar topic.

Some of my favorite parts are Felicity’s narration of some theatre-related memories.

Felicity at age 6 about to play the role of the changeling boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“I don’t remember rehearsing but I do remember.. going over and over the line that I should exit on. I was to march up and down several times, guarding the sleeping Titania, until Oberon came on, then I was to go “Ohhh” and run off. I can still recall the feeling of the wooden stage beneath my bare feet, the warmth of the lights that blinded me at first and made the audience shadowy figures in a dark pit beyond the footlights. Secure in my bright new world, I marched up and down, guarding my queen for all it was worth. The lights dimmed and I heard a voice. “BooHughaaowf”. It was not my cue so I marched on. Suddenly there was Oberon looming over me. He leaned over and hissed ‘BOOGER OFF’. I had been so absorbed in my part that I had missed my exit line.”

Fortunately I never had the same experience - mostly cos once on stage I was always on it (usually half dead and beaten black and blue by either Adil or Suryanarayan). But I still get an occasional nightmare (I swear I do) that I’m on stage, remember none of the lines, Adil is glaring at me and baba is pulling at his beard with a reproachful look on his face. Once during the performance of Ionesco's “The Lesson”, Adil forgot his lines. Not that you could blame him since he had to speak some highly politically charged mumbo jumbo nonstop for 45 minutes while I just had to wail out “I’ve got a toothache” in different shades of emotions periodically.

So he forgot his lines and started glaring at me...There was a really awkward and long silence. I was not sure whether he was so into his character of a bullying professor that he was just overdoing the glaring or I had missed some emotion of toothache. We continued to stare at each other for what seemed like 10 minutes and suddenly I felt this strong urge to break into nervous giggles, which would have been disastrous since it was the peak of the violent melodrama. All I could do was to fall on the floor and make my giggles sound like muffled tooth-achy wails till Adil recovered.

Another more senti part that I love in the book, : Felicity age 9, about to debut in the role of Lady Macduff’s son “The dressing room was silent now. I sat quietly, a cold feeling moving slowly around the pit of my stomach. The play seemed to last forever. Actors came and went, were killed or conquered, quick changes happened with costumes flying here and there; and no one seemed to pay me any attention as they passed by in different stages of blood, sweat and concentration”…. “Still ringing in my ears were my father’s words: ‘Don’t forget , breathe deeply before you go on stage. Don’t dither, stand with your feet firmly and grip the stage. Keep your head high, your eye up and don’t creep around. Enter with power. Don’t fidget, remember your stock in trade is your voice and your body, be strong with both – don’t use a gesture if a word will do. And don’t chatter in the wings, it takes away your power.’”

The words I used to hear were a little different: “Why the fuck are you squeaking? Don’t tell me that’s the best you can do? Can you drop all your irritating pretensions of being a good girl who can’t raise her voice”. But then they still do echo in my nightmares!

“It was very dark in the wings, very different from the mornings when I had happily rehearsed in the sunlit stage. This was somehow serious and I did not like it. This pool of light seemed a strange and terrifying place, somewhere I would be swallowed up. I suddenly felt as if I were stranded on the top of a big dipper – my head hurt, my legs turned to stone. I tried to breathe, but it only got worse. Escape was the only solution. I had to go, I had to go now, before it was too late”.
I swear this Felicity woman has stolen my lines and my emotions. Ever so often during Gum and Goo, I felt like sneaking out from the backdoor or pretending to faint right before my monologue.

Oh.. talking about monologues, just saw this brilliant play by Nandikar from Kolkata. But then that's for a different post.