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Naseeruddin Shah does not believe in blood on stage. 'If it's too real, the audience worries,' he once said of Motley's ill-starred Julius Caesar. 'And if it's not real, they laugh.'
And so, Shah chose imaginary daggers. That anecdote is worth carrying into 27 Seconds, Motley's adaptation of Salman Rushdie's memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, which premieres at the Prithvi Theatre Festival in Mumbai. The title is the duration of the assault. On 12 August 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, Rushdie was about to lecture on keeping writers safe when a young man rushed the stage and stabbed him around 15 times. He survived but lost the sight of his right eye. A play about a stabbing, staged by a director who refuses to stab anyone, promises an interesting evening.
The terms of engagement are strict. Every spoken line comes verbatim from the memoir. Shah plays Rushdie and co-directs with Arghya Lahiri. Malaika Choudhury plays Rachel Eliza Griffiths, the poet and wife whom the book casts as something close to its hero. Rushdie has reportedly given the project his blessing.
Rushdie himself has described the book's arc neatly: 'a love story which turns into a murder story, which turns back into a love story.' Between those poles sit unsparing hospital passages and loftier meditations on art and liberty. Some have found the book 'at its best when it is at its most visceral' and at risk of banality when it climbs to the philosophical. Looking at Motley's recent track record with Ismat Chugtai and Saadat Hassan Manto; 27 Seconds will probably underscore the thing Rushdie says in Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder: 'The most important of these things is that art challenges orthodoxy'.
The most promising answer lies in the memoir's strangest chapter, an imagined interrogation of the assailant. Rushdie declines to name him and calls him only 'the A'. The man was 24, and by his own account had read nothing Rushdie wrote. Rushdie calls it 'a very American attack', the product of years in a basement with video games and online sermons, a 'brainwashing of some kind'. Yet in the dialogue he refuses to make his adversary a straw man. 'You got to give the enemy an even break,' he has said. On the page it reads as a Socratic cross-examination. On stage it needs only two actors and a pair of chairs. Therefore, a play.
Today Naseeruddin Shah has rock star status. But the Motley theatre group's origins are quite modest. Shah recalls that the idea came from Benjamin Gilani over chai in Lucknow's Hazratganj during the shooting of the film Junoon. Motley's first production was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Budgets were kept low and casts small, and there were nights when the audience numbered ten. The company is now approaching its 50th year. Its creed comes from a bit of the Kendalls, a bit of Satyadev Dubey and a bit of Jerzy Grotowski's 'poor theatre': strip away everything extraneous and the human being is left. 'The magic of theatre is to stimulate the audience's imagination, not to deceive them,' Shah says. He is also a sworn enemy of the fourth wall, and of what he calls 'purple lights and chamber music'. Many of the 27 Seconds cast have never acted on stage before.
Context gives the production an edge beyond the theatrical. India was the first country to ban Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, in 1988. Rushdie's words have been treated as contraband here for longer than most of this cast has been alive. Speaking them aloud, unabridged, in a Mumbai auditorium is a radical act. Rushdie's diagnosis of the present mood is that disagreement is nothing new: 'What's new is the volume and the heat.'
The memoir ends with Rushdie's return to Chautauqua, he says 'to show myself that I was standing up where I fell down.' Outside the county jail where his attacker was held, he reports, his feet started dancing. The stage was where he fell, and Naseeruddin Shah is giving him another one to stand on.
As Pampa Kampana in Rushdie's Victory City says, 'I have lived to see an empire rise and fall... Only these words describing those things remain... All that remains is this city of words. Words are the only victors.' This is a good reason to watch 27 Seconds on stage. It's a defiant artist's story. And it's a story of art's survival.
#Ramu Ramanathan is a playwright, poet and journalist.
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