Anyone who has been following the column, knows that I am a theatre-junkie. I can’t visit anywhere without trying to weed out those with a penchant for performance.

I have to sit on a chair. It’s better for my acting.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you want to run a play for a long time, you will eventually re-cast.
It is one of the downsides of a successful acting industry. If the actors are good, their availability is much harder to come by. So if producers/directors want the “show to go on”, then you must replace actors.
But what are the actors busy with?

My last fortnight has been spent in normally unfamiliar circumstances: working and performing with people not usually connected with theatre at all.

I got to the Gateway of India just as the boat pulled away from the pier. Damn it! I had missed the last boat of the day to Mandwa.

Quasar Thakore Padamsee

The other day, as I flipped through the mindless television channels, I heard a film actor comment about how much fun it was to do a multi-starrer film.
This is not really a concept we have in theatre. We don’t quite have stars. We have actors, unless they are film people who happen to be doing theatre. A Randeep Hooda, Sandhya Mridul, KK Menon, Naseeruddin Shah have all worked in theatre quite earnestly, but they are still FILM stars in theatre, not theatre stars.

Not so long ago, young actors would streak their hair white when preparing for a role. The reason, there weren’t too many parts written for young protagonists, so if you wanted a meaty role, you had to “age”.
Fortunately a lot has changed since then. Now actors tend to lie about their age, in order to keep drinking from the fountain of youth.

Quasar Thakore Padamsee

The other day I stood addressing a conference at IIT Bombay. The topic was Social Media. The day had begun with a presentation by someone from Microsoft, then Yahoo, then Google and then...me.
What on earth was I doing at a conference of this nature?

In my last column a few weeks ago, I bitched and moaned, with some jealousy, about the shared language of musicians and how easily they can “jam”.

As a person of theatre I have always been jealous of how musicians can jam together so easily. On stage. In a cafe. On the street. No rehearsal required.