An Interview with Alaknanda Samarth

AN INTERVIEW WITH ALAKNANDA SAMARTH
Appeared in the March 2012 issue of PT Notes.

All my life, I’d heard of Alaknanda Samarth’s work and worth, yet I never managed to see her performances or talk to her about her experiences on stage. When I first met her, I was very young, at an age where I couldn’t fully comprehend what her work was about. Yet, I always felt a sense of pride because she happened to be my aunt. So I decided to interview her for PT Notes.
Her powerful words and the richness of her theatre experiences educated me on what theatre has been like in the West and here in India, through so many decades.

Aadya : Satyadev Dubey has passed away. You acted in his first and biggest hit, 'Band Darwaze'. How did working with him contribute to your growth?
Alaknanda Samarth : Dubey in 1964-'65 had a corrosive laugh, a savage impatience with existing systems and with himself. He commanded a chaste, muscular Hindi. He offered me a role in Sartre's French play 'No Exit'(1944) - in Urdu.
I’d just returned from spending 5 years in the West and I'd never acted in Urdu. First, he cast me as the lesbian Post Office clerk and then changed it to the socialite murderess. So Sulabha Deshpande and I switched roles. He played the army deserter. All three are dead. In Hell. Amrish Puri played the Valet/Death.
Every language is a map with bleeding, porous borders. It's not bandaged. 'Band Darwaze' helped my growth at the deepest level of language as consciousness. He paid meticulous attention to syntax and the substrata of text analysis.
'She's India's only properly trained actress,' he always said of me to my embarrassment! We didn't take ourselves seriously. To this day people who've NEVER SEEN THE PRODUCTION DESCRIBE IT TO ME IN DETAIL. Why did it sweep everyone off their feet?
Because it was the moment that language shifted palpably and visibly on the Bombay stage and so gave rise to a new, inclusive audience.
THE AUDIENCE CHANGED. That's a revolutionary act in theatre. It doesn't happen twice. It happened in 'BAND DARWAZE'.

Aadya: Why did you go to train in the West? Were there Indian influences at RADA? Can you compare the Indian and British
theatre scenes in the '60's?

AS : In 1959, I played Strindberg's 'Miss Julie' opposite Mr Alkazi in English. I didn't know that there was a professor, from an American university, in the audience.
They offered me a round airtrip and the Wien International Scholarship in Theatre Arts to Brandeis University in the U.S. I hadn't even heard of Brandeis!
It was random, quite by chance! On the way back with my airticket I stopped in London, auditioned for RADA and got a scholarship.

At RADA, India was not in the consciousness. I was one of the very first few Indians there. No one mentioned India. I was given leading roles in European classics. The peer group was wildly talented and generous with me. They are lifelong friends. I went with the flow.
Voice training was the big discovery. That led me to study Indian vachika traditions. Neela Bhagwat worked on pre-expressive sound systems with me.
Comparisons are corrosive. Contexts are specific. In the '60's, Indian theatre had to reclaim its narrative and reconfigure. The FTII and NSD began to evolve training programmes for the modern Indian actor. Hugely painful, ongoing tasks. You know that struggle and history.
Since 1993, I've known the great Voice Teacher Patsy Rodenburg. Her work on the actor's Circles of Energy and Presence is profound. Her lived understanding of Shakespeare is a revelation

Britain saw an explosion of popular culture and a sexual revolution. Censorship was abolished in 1968. Nudity, sex and drugs shockingly appeared on stage in the musical 'Hair'. In Osborne's 'Look Back in Anger'(1956) an upper class protagonist was seen ironing for the first time! In Wesker's play 'The Kitchen'(1953), cooks, cleaners, waitresses and immigrants sweated it out over the kitchen sink.

On TV, Asians and Blacks became visible. The British Film Institute (BFI) did a book, 'Black and White in Colour’ (ed. Jim Pines, 1992), on 45 years of Black and Asian representation. One of my portrayals was chosen as the three most radical. In 'Z Cars' a hit police series I play an Indian woman with 2 kids married to a Black man who murders a white policeman with an axe. ‘A Place of Safety' deals with Institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police. Even today, that would be explosive.

In 1975, I was the 1st Indian actress in a classical lead at the National Theatre at the Old Vic - the shrine where Olivier, Gielgud, Richard Burton had acted. There was no political correctness, no emerging Indian market, no flavour of the month Bollywood. One had to be on the ball on stage in a star studded cast of superb verse speakers.

Today's 2nd generation British Asian actors speak English as their mother tongue. In the last decade, there are many more roles for them. British Asian dance has an international superstar in Akram Khan. But the theatre movement has been absorbed. The Bollywood imaginary has taken over.

I've never been part of the Asian scene. There has been some interaction with Black Theatre and Film collectives. Played famous Arab texts like Tewfik Al-Hakim.
Worked over the years with little known avant-garde groups like The Address, Puzzle Club, Muzikansky, Hawsksmoor Music Project. Maverick radicals, in studio theatres, no publicity or funds but freedom to culturally catalyse great texts in my own voice and defy categorisation.


Aadya: You taught acting at the NSD. Could you speak about that?

AS: BV Karanth invited me. I lived in India (1979-82). Acting classes were in Hindi. Some students didn’t speak it fluently. I changed it so they did exercises in their mothertongues to unleash internal rhythms. Teaching has led me to a methodology but I'm not an academic or systematic, rarely write things down. It’s in the moment for the actor in front of me, their fears,
time, place, reality. Every actor gets to the role in his own way. Later I worked in Trichur, directed 2 open air productions of Shakespeare and Edward Bond in Malayalam, learnt the texts by heart! Working with Tomba, I found Manipur's electrifying vachika rituals. In London, actors are from everywhere. Many cadences, histories of Civil War, Communism, the Holocaust, Palestine. We've been exploring Cultural Memory, Sound Memory

Aadya: You've done landmark solo shows. Tell us about 'KUNTI AND THE HUMAN VOICE' and "MEDEAMATERIAL' both in Bombay.
What are the modes of rehearsal in collaborations since you live far from India?

AS: I don’t think in terms of 'far and near'. There are 'Other Indias', diasporic energies, wheels within cultural wheels. It’s a question of unravelling them.
'KUNTI AND THE HUMAN VOICE' in Hindi and English, directed by Kumar Shahani was the first solo in 1987. It examined the female impulse in two distinct contexts. Kumar's sensibility and unique vision of cinema actually transformed my acting. Gave it transparency. We went on to do 5 major pieces of work together, including 2 feature films, one unfinished feature and 2 short films in London.

Solos have been a constant, in music theatre, texts by Pakistani, Arab, European writers in London. In 1992, I began an ongoing collaboration with visual artist Nalini Malani. We did Heiner Muller's Medea Trilogy. Nalini's work is so layered. The body becomes a magical image. It's glamorous. The ground rules are not those of theatre. It’s freeing.
Our latest in Switzerland in 2010 was 'Medea Revisited'.

'Texts' of this complexity are 2-3 years in the making. With shifting modes of exchange but always with constant trust. On the phone, interactive, in person and in the last lap 4-6 weeks in situ. That’s the mode of rehearsal.

Aadya : Have you got any future projects?

AS : A couple of ideas, one in India. What they have in common is to test the limits of performance, acting itself and thus question the role of the audience/spectator/listener. Such work has no cultural marketability. It’s working on and in process and as such on the cutting edge of vulnerability and even failure. That gives it energy.