Silver screen actors answer the call of the stage

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Tonight city theatre fans are in for a treat as veteran Bollywood actor Paresh Rawal will stage his superhit play Krishan vs Kanhaiya. Earlier this week, actor Kulbushan Kharbanda displayed his mettle on stage with the play Atmakatha to a full house and actress and singer Ila Arun had everyone in splits with her theatre outing Namaste translated from Tom Dudzick’s 1990 comedy Greetings!. After watching the latter, Amitabh Bachchan expressed his longing to switch back to theatre in a blog entry. Theatre has always been the first love of most actors, and many popular stars of the silver screen rose from the ranks of theatre. While cinema gave them fame and money, many of them still nurse a special fondness for theatre.
“In the 60s, I was involved with the theatre group Abhiyaan. Eventually, cinema catapulted me to fame and financial stability and I stuck to it. But for an actor, theatre is an addiction. The high one gets from the audience’s reaction is unimaginable. With films, we complete shooting much before it is released and by the time it releases we have already detached ourselves from it,” says Kharbanda, talking after Atmakatha played to a full-house. Given a chance, he would love to take up theatre more often, he adds.
Prior to striking big with films like Tanu Weds Manu, Listen…Amaya and Raanjhnaa, actress Swara Bhaskar was a part of Act One Theatre group, Delhi. Talking about her preference for the medium, she puts forth, “Acting in theatre allows an organic growth of the graph of one’s character during the performance. It allows one to hold and stay with an emotion for far long than in a film format. While shooting for films your longest shots are not more than two minutes normally, so one ends up performing in spurts.”
Agrees her co-actor from the film Raanjhnaa, Shilpi Marwaha who has been an active member of the Asmita theatre group for many years and only recently ventured into cinema. “Cinema is a road ahead for most actors but they are born and polished on stage. Personally, acting on stage is a disciplined task of concentrating the mind, body and soul. Even if I take up cinema to gain more public attention, theatre will always be a sacred space I will come back to again and again. But yes, theatre and especially Hindi theatre hardly is lucrative in terms of remuneration. As a result, most take the road towards cinema,” she asserts.
Theatre gives actors a chance to experiment. “Every new production or show provides scope to do something novel, add a certain improvisation. Just like a singer needs to do riyaaz every morning to excel and maintain his voice, an actor needs to return to the stage to hone his skills and connect with the pulse of the audience. An actor on stage controls the entire duration of the play,” opines theatre veteran M.K. Raina.
Actor Raj Kumar Yadav, who received praise for his role in Kai Po Che, Talaash and Gangs of Wasseypur-Part 2 and rose from ranks of theatre, says he has huge respect for the medium. “The kind of popularity and power that cinema provides is phenomenal. For me that is a priority. At the risk of sounding snobbish, I would say I can never really get back to it. That phase in my life is through,” he says.