Based in Bengaluru, and seen in selected plays and films, Padmavati Rao is in Mumbai for shows of her play APNE GHAR JAISA, directed by Anmol Vellani, produced by Ranga Shankara. For most of the play, she is alone on stage, waiting for a man who is to come as a paying guest in her home. Till he arrives, her mind has gone into dark places, her prejudices against ‘the other’ emerge, and as she speaks, she also makes the audience confront their own biases. Excerpts from an interview:
By Deepa Gahlot
Anmol Vellani said that Ranga Shankara was looking for an actress to play the lead in APNE GHAR JAISA, and realized you were right there all along (Padmavati is Arundhati Nag's sister)! So what was the process of working on the play like?
I'll tell you an inside story. I was asked by Ranga Shankara if I wanted to do this play, and I said, of course. They sent me the script and I loved it. I was very intrigued because when you see the script, it is very short, and I said how are we going to show this, you know, because it's all about what is playing out in this woman's mind. Then I got a message that Anmol wants to know what is your way of working. I said, I will be like clay in his hands. My ego will be shoved deep inside my pocket, but I will not take foul language. That is my ground rule for any production. So that message went to him, and we started work. It's been quite a journey, because he is very sharp; you can't move one word from here to there. We had a translation that I felt worked on paper, but for the performance it needed something more.
Then he also brought in elements which were not there in the original translation. Like there's a bit where she talks about an electrician who comes to the house and he's been coming for 20 years. And there's never been a problem. She talks about that and she also goes on to say, but we are different. So that piece I wrote in, and also the piece about different people she seems to have a problem with; she is wondering who this tenant is going to be, who is going to come into this house and take up her son's room. She seems to have a problem with everyone whether it's vegetarian, non-vegetarian, whether it's anyone from Maharashtra, whether it's from Kolhapur, Sholapur, Nagpur, Pune she has a take. She has an opinion about everybody and everything. Even about a student from Africa she has made her assumptions. So that piece also I wrote in. We used to work on the script--initially we just read through it and looked for those changes that both of us agreed on. We were ruthless with it, we hammered away and tinkered away at it and arrived at what we have as the performance script.
And then it came to working with the design of the play with which he's done brilliantly. You know, he has used miniature furniture, and that was such a cool idea. Otherwise you have these big sets and that's a very obvious thing to do. But he just brought it all down, where she's playing with it and she's moving things around and what each thing signifies for her and how she relates to those things; somewhere all those things have become symbols of her son's presence, that she has kept alive both in her mind and in her environment. And in that sense, she's very much like Ms Havisham from Charles Dickens (Great Expectations), where she hangs on to things. And how she has to come to terms with making room for this other entity that is going to occupy this space which she has guarded, she has protected, which she has looked after and hung on to, and in that somewhere losing sight of all the assumptions she has made in life about the outside world the world beyond the four walls of a house.
It's interesting, this collaborative process you and the director arrived at. It has been like ki aapko ek kapda diya jata hai aur uspe fir aap kadhai katein hain bariki se, actually putting one stitch after another and stitch had to have its logic, its reasoning. It had to have its firm foundation in reasoning, in terms of why something was being suggested and why it should be kept or knocked off from the play. So, yeah, that's been a very enriching process.
So, is this the normal process you use when you are working on a play or is it because it's a one almost a one woman play?
Honestly, as an actor I do work on the roles. I will look at the history of the character which the script may not provide. I will look for who is she? Where is she coming from? What is the kind of person she has become because of her history? Now, that history comes to you in bits and pieces, in little fragments which are provided in the script. After that one builds on it. I had the advantage of language both in Marathi and Hindi and English, so I was able to weave the three together and in that sense, yeah, I think my contribution as an actor was there. I do that with every play. At some point in my journey as an actor, I think this got articulated as a process. Initially when I began I was a 15- year-old, so we were thrown in at the deep end, but slowly as the culture of theatre in Bombay and in Karnataka-- modern theatre as I knew it-- evolved, I saw that the articulation of these processes became available both to me and the fraternity. We were all reading things. We had access to things which was not the case earlier. And so, I guess, we also evolved and it became part of our process.
To bring to life something that the director has imagined, for you to put aside everything that you are familiar with and to surrender and go with faith. You know that this man (Vellani) knows what he is saying, and what he is doing. That is a moment of surrender. And then finding my own reasoning for it because there are things that did go against my grain and I thought: would she say this? Would a person actually do this? Then I had a personal experience in my life with a person from whom I had rented a space in the village where children used to come to listen to stories from me. Some child would put its head in my lap, and I'd be continuing to tell the story. All this was going on and suddenly the landlady came out and said to the children, don't you know where you should sit and where you shouldn't and how you should sit and how you shouldn't, and by the time I turn back and said why are you shouting to the children, the child had got up and gone out of the door. The rage I saw in her eyes that day. I had never seen that before, and I had thought, this exists. And I think somewhere that became real for me. You know till that point in the rehearsals, I had been finding it very difficult to find the sur of this woman.
Going back to the story about the landlady in the village, you must have come across people like that in your interaction with people, because we know people like that, and their prejudices also come with a kind of stereotyping of everyone. It is becoming more prevalent and that's why the play became important for me, personally I felt that there were these people, and I was now opening my eyes to their assumptions. For someone like me-- born in Delhi, brought up in Bombay my mother was Maharashtrian my father was from south Karnataka, so my native place is Chintamani, but we speak a lot of languages; at home there was a certain openness, which my cousins didn't have. They got the richness of tradition, I guess, as we got the richness of my parents having broken away from tradition. Because way back in 1950 when they got married, they had a love marriage. And we had an upbringing where we had tremendous freedom, even as a girl child. I had, I think more freedom than my brothers. I realized that this was such a privilege, that I was one among a million simply because I got this freedom to choose, and have the freedom to pay the price also for it, and be supported despite that. No matter what, support was not taken away.
So yes, I have come across such people and I also see how it limits their world view, their relationships and the openness between people. It takes away from the wholesomeness of it all somehow, and with that I have a problem. They may not act on it, but the fact that these thoughts are churning in people's minds more so today, which is disturbing, That is why this character I'm playing reflects that a lot. It's like the fine print, which you don't read.
You assume that nothing will happen until something does happen and then everything blows up in your face. All the assumptions you've made about people about their openness and all and you scratch a bit, and it's like my god the stuff that comes up is quite amazing. A play like this reflects people to themselves, and the ones who are enlightened enough, understand that.
Has the play changed or evolved in any way from the reactions that people may have had to the play? Yes, yes, it has. When we opened, I remember I used to play her with a slightly harsher edge. We had some very strong reactions from people who I'm glad shared their real opinions with us. Then we also looked at it in a more human way from her point of view. And we allowed ourselves to say that she doesn't know better. She has not had the exposure to feel differently about this.
And she is trying to make room, even if it's a decision taken by her husband, where he says so and so is going to come and he should feel at home here. Despite that she is making room for him. She is trying to make him feel welcome and all of that. But what does she do with all this (her prejudices)? That seems to come up without even her being aware that she holds this kind of assumption, with a certain vehemence.That makes the difference to how she conducts herself in her imaginary world also. She is aghast in the moment of truth that she comes face to face with herself. She has gone down this rabbit hole and she suddenly discovers this truth in that one moment about herself, and she is apologetic about it. She is horrified. She has so many layers of emotions running through her at that moment. In that one moment when she welcomes him into the home, she makes peace, I think, not only with herself, but also with a larger context.
This is a special play, and would this experience spoil, so that you cannot go back to do something different? I am not sure, I only have to live and learn and tell because, yes, a play like this really spoils you, because again within its parameters, within its well defined boundaries, I have found tremendous freedom. That, especially when you are by yourself, comes with its own pitfalls. Sometimes I fly with it, and sometimes I just cope with it.
Apart from APNE GHAR JAISA, what have you been busy with? I am also doing THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA, by Lorca. Arundhati Raja has directed it, and we have just finished five shows at Jagriti Theatre (Bengaluru). I play Maria Josefa, a small cameo of the grandmother. It was difficult for me to travel for rehearsals, but I wanted to be a part of it.
(*Deepa Gahlot is a journalist, columnist, author and curator. Some of her writings are on deepagahlot.com)
