Last September, a theater-loving friend, usually unexcitable, put up a Facebook status exclaiming that Atul Kumar’s Hamlet – The Clown Prince was coming to Delhi. Intrigued by such enthusiasm from someone usually composed, I clicked on the status message. More enthusiasm. Oh my god let’s go, said the Delhi people, while Oh my god, you can’t miss it for anything, said the Bombay ones, sounding too much like: Now you can go watch it about a year-and-a-half after we’ve seen it 17 times.
I booked tickets immediately, and a few minutes into the show I understood the hysteria. In the play directed by Rajat Kapoor, Atul Kumar thrilled the packed audience by playing the Hamlet clown. The actors seemed to take the text and throw it in the air, catching only those scenes they felt like, changing whatever they wanted to. Unlike the usually dour Hamlet, Atul Kumar’s prince was funny, expressive, spontaneous; often breaking away from the acting to talk directly to us, his captivated audience, startling the first row people no end.
I hadn’t seen a full house like this in a while – you don’t get Delhi to part with 500 bucks for theater easily – and the auditorium roared with laughter, clapped with genuine delight. Standing ovations are becoming tiresomely obligatory but that evening, Delhi willingly stood to acknowledge the brilliant performance.
When in January Atul Kumar brought his musical – a Hindi adaptation of Twelfth Night – to Delhi, I didn’t need any convincing to go. Piya Behrupia premiered at the Globe Theater as part of the World Shakespeare Festival in 2012 – 37 countries were invited to participate, and Atul Kumar’s The Company Theater represented India. This time, I witnessed his vision as a director. Presented in the nautanki style, the actors sang the tale, making the audience laugh with improvisations. Sebastian, for instance – played by Amitosh Nagpal – complained bitterly about having too few scenes in the play, often taking potshots at his director. Characters jibed at each other in a mix of Hindi, Punjabi and English, often breaking out in a fight. It was all, quite literally, a nautanki.
To the layperson and the critic, Atul Kumar is, above everything, an entertainer. Theater critic Lyn Gardner, though bemoaning the fact that Atul ignored the melancholy at the heart of the play, wrote in The Guardian: “Fun? Definitely. Accessible? Completely, even if you didn’t speak the language.” He plays up the buffoonery Shakespeare was so good at, and reminds us there’s only one thing we can do with tragedy: laugh it off.
All the shows were full houses, something 45-year-old Atul Kumar is getting used to. In Bombay his plays run to 150-200 packed shows. Unsurprisingly for those who have seen it, Piya Behrupia won several nominations at the Mahindra Excellence in Theater Award 2014, including in the Best Director and Best Play categories.
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Introduced to theater at age 14, in two years Atul was already auditioning for professional theater and in another two, directing his first play. “If my father had not died when I was 14, I wouldn’t have been doing theater,” says Atul when I meet him at his mother’s home in south Delhi a few days after the Piya Behrupia shows. “I would’ve been a lala, selling dry fruit in Old Delhi.”
South Delhi is not where his mother always lived. His home was in the rather poetically named Gali Tota Maina, near Tilak Bazaar in Old Delhi. Every man in his father’s orthodox Marwari family ran a business; they had shops in Khari Boali and sold dry fruits. He is not exaggerating when he says he’d have been a lala too. Everyone had to join the family business. There was no way out.
But then his father died. His mother didn’t get along with the family and moved out. She put him in an English medium school, St Xavier’s, where he was first introduced to the stage. “Even mum wanted me do something regular like be a doctor or an engineer like all mothers do,” he explains. “But Xavier’s used to have these theater competitions…”
He did really well on stage, won medals and, very soon, theater consumed Atul. He would often go to watch plays alone. One such day, he was at Mandi House for Rajendra Nath’s Jaat Hi Poocho Sadhu Ki where people from the theater group Chingari, including his friend Rajat Kapoor, were intrigued by the teenager watching a play all by himself. They asked him to come for an audition. In 1984, only 16 years old, Atul joined Chingari – the first step toward a full time career in theater.
He flares up when I suggest that it is with Chingari that he did professional theater for the first time. “Professional? What’s professional theater? Such a thing doesn’t exist in India.” He looks upset. “I’d call it a profession if it can pay my bills, can pay for my daughter’s education…I still have to do the odd non-theater job, advertisements, to fund those bills.” Then he calms down, and remembers that times are better now. This is 2014. His Shakespeare shows are a hit. “It is becoming easier,” he admits. “Now it’s only once in a while that I have to digress from theater and do something commercial. And then I charge a lot of money!” he grins.
He might not have become a lala, but money was always part of Atul’s plans. At 26, he launched his company, The Company Theater (TCT), and today he is perhaps the only theaterperson in India (especially in urban English theater) to run his company like a business. He needed – and found – someone to make sure his company kept getting shows: Sachin Kamani, who plays multiple roles at TCT. Aggressively marketing Atul’s and Rajat’s plays, Sachin ensures that TCT always has something on stage almost every month: they do between 70 and 100 shows a year. This, coupled with Atul’s personal networking skills, has given the company a global presence. “He actually makes a living on theater, the only person in at least Bombay and Delhi to do so,” says old friend Munish Bhardwaj. “By being business savvy, Atul has shown the way to a lot of other people on how to make theater a full time career.”
The large number of packed shows means that Atul’s plays not only pay for themselves now but also fund his ongoing experiments. This has also enabled him to realize the lifelong dream of having an artiste’s residency. In 2012, he opened The Company Theatre Workspace in Kamshet, Maharashtra, where apart from creating his latest plays, he has already hosted several international artistes. A quick getaway from Bombay, the residency has space for visiting artistes to stay and space to practise and perform.
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It all seems obvious now, but Atul’s ability to chase his dreams and his faith in his instinct is quite extraordinary. Midway through college, Atul left Hansraj and went to study French at JNU. “In college, all our conversations were around the French greats and that motivated me to study French in greater detail,” he says, as if it was the most natural thing to do. “I was very inspired by Ionesco, Genet, and wanted to read them in their original language.”
His college-mates remember that as an actor, Atul was already showing rare talent. “You knew you were looking at a special talent. His technique was very Chaplinesque, his ability to do different roles was great,” says Munish. “Even at 19, he was 100 percent accomplished.”
At 19, in 1987, Atul directed his first play, Sartre’s A Respectable Prostitute, with Munish as co-actor. Interestingly, Atul played the female lead, the prostitute. Munish remembers him being brilliant on stage. “I wanted to act like Atul Kumar…,” he says wistfully. Atul, however, thinks he cannot direct himself. “I realized very early on that I can’t see myself from the outside,” he tells me, perhaps referring to the Sartre play, possibly the last time he directed himself. “I need an outside eye. I really marvel at actor-directors, I can’t do that. I have always needed direction.”
In Rajat, he found that outside eye. Most of his acting has been with Rajat, with whom he also experimented with clowning for the first time in C for Clown, followed by Hamlet and Nothing Like Lear. “He brings a lot to a play,” says Rajat. “Of course Atul is one of our finest actors, his talent is obvious, his discipline admirable, but it doesn’t end with acting. He brings with him his rigor for theater.”
This rigor saw him learn kathakali and kalaripayattu in 1990, when at the Sahitya Kala Parishad’s annual theater festival he was exposed to regional theater. He saw Ratan Thiyam’s Chakravyuha, Satyadev Dubey’s Andha Yug, Kavalam Narayana Panicker’s Karnabharam. It blew his mind. “In Delhi, my world was only my friends, all wonderful people but they only talked European theater and everything that was not Indian…”
Atul tried to go to Manipur looking for a guru in Ratan Thiyam, but Thiyam worked in the local language. Then he went to Kerala and found a guru in Panicker. He stayed much longer than anyone expected. “I realised my guru derives a lot of inspiration from the art forms kathakali and kalaripayattu – I did three years of kathakali to understand the source of his inspiration.”
No one just moves across the country to understand the source of someone else’s inspiration. But to a man in his 20s with a single focus, it seemed unremarkable. Atul returned from Kerala and charged off to France to work with Philippe Genty, who has been among his main inspirations. “I wanted a direction,” he tries to explain. “I didn’t have a choice; I didn’t know anything but theater. I couldn’t get a job.”
His single-minded focus on theater made him attractive to many people. Especially women. In talking about his personal life, he stiffens, because there have been more than a few entanglements and more than the usual number of wives. Like everything else, his love life is dominated by theater. “I have a bad habit of falling in love with my actresses,” he says and then laughs, “and I don’t learn from my mistakes, I repeat patterns.”
In 1997, he shifted to Bombay partly because his second wife (and co-actor) wanted to pursue her film career more seriously. And partly because Atul had also tasted blood. With Chingari, he had travelled to Bombay and witnessed the exciting theater scene there. “I knew I would eventually live in Bombay, there was a huge audience for theater in Bombay. In Delhi things were not at that scale.”
On his trips, he had met and befriended Sanjana Kapoor, who became his friend and guide in Bombay. “She gave me Prithvi to grow in,” he says. He owes her a huge debt, he says. “We travelled around the world together, dreamt of things together.” Sanjana had brought the Prithvi International Theater Festival to Delhi in 1994, which was also where he launched The Company Theater with The Chairs.
In the initial days in Bombay, Atul dabbled in films, doing odd roles in Thakshak and Mangal Pandey. “I had friends in the fraternity, it was easy.” He talks casually of opportunities that many would kill for. “The good thing is that it ended pretty soon.” He wanted to focus on theater, but he also realised he was no good on screen. “Theater is an actor’s medium,” says Rajat, “while in films, the camera rules. You need to not act. The best of theater actors don’t do well in films.”
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The Company Theater has since done several plays but The Blue Mug, first done in 2002, and revived in 2008, is most special to Atul. “It is my most satisfying work so far. It also made money which is a plus.” In 2002, not too many people watched it but then all the actors – Ranvir Shorey, Rajat Kapoor, Vinay Pathak, Sheeba Chaddha – became movie stars and in 2008 it became an international hit. “It was the same play but just because the bloody actors became filmstars, suddenly everyone wanted to watch the play!”
Somewhere along the line, Shakespeare became prominent in Atul’s theater. After Hamlet, Twelfth Night and King Lear, he is now working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “It is being translated as we speak,” he shares, “I might do something with Romeo and Juliet soon. And Rajat is threatening to do Macbeth.” He goes on and on (and on) about the glories of Shakespeare, and the timelessness of great plays. “I don’t think I will ever stop doing Shakespeare.”
“I have been tracking his work for roughly two decades,” says Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork, “and his evolution as an actor, director and as a theater company is astounding. He is always trying to work in a new language. The form or flow – be it the clowns or the more conventional The Blue Mug – to use a workshop methodology to bring excellence on stage is amazing. No one in the country has such a body of work that is so consistently brilliant.”
Consistently brilliant are two words that come up repeatedly when I speak to people. Among his peers and senior colleagues, his talent is celebrated. High praise comes from Naseeruddin Shah. “I can’t think of any others who are on the kind of search that Atul is,” says Shah, “his body of work is phenomenal and consistently excellent. He could have settled for second-rate Bollywood roles but he opted out and focused on theater work where he knew he could shine.”
Over the years both his acting and directing kept getting experimental. The Chairs, for instance, was a literal Hindi translation of the original text but now often Atul disregards the original text. “I have moved more and more toward devised work,” he says, “I want to eventually do away with scripts altogether.”
Devised work is the order of the day. For the recent Asian Paints Twitter campaign ‘Speechless’, Atul did a series of improv mime performances. People sent tweets describing moments that left them speechless and, within minutes, Atul – who was in the studio for two days doing this – would mime the moment. Under 30 minutes, people got videos with their moments mimed, making the campaign a huge success.
Not everyone is a fan of his devised work, though. I meet veteran theater artiste Kusum Haidar at a party and she smiles pleasantly as she says in her genteel voice: “You know, my dear, I don’t quite like Atul’s work.” She hastens to add that it’s only her personal opinion and not a dismissal of his work. “I saw Piya Behrupia and while it is great entertainment, it isn’t my kind of work, I have been trained in a different way, the plays that I personally want to be part of are those that delve deeper into the relationship between characters, and have some kind of social message.” But Kusum Haidar feels Atul, nevertheless, is doing a great service to theater. “You can’t get on to the stage and make people laugh unless you are skillful. People are rushing to the theater thanks to him, you saw how they loved him in Delhi!”
From his many peers and seniors in the trade, this is the first time I hear criticism. So I dig some more. “Well, I won’t say I don’t like it,” says Naseeruddin Shah reluctantly, “but I am not sure this clown form that he is exploring is capable of getting him where he wants to be.” While he appreciates Hamlet, he doesn’t think the Lear play matches up. “I loved Hamlet, saw it five times,” he says, “but Nothing Like Lear was a letdown, he’s great at lampooning but the depth he managed in Hamlet along with the lampooning was missing in Lear.” He thinks perhaps it is time for Atul to move on from the clowns.
But with money comes its share of problems. While Atul succeeded in making theater pay, sometimes that becomes frustrating for him. “I hate stagnation,” he says, looking frustrated. “Sometimes I am done with a play, a form, I want to move on, but I have to keep it going because it’s still running to packed houses, still making money.” Sachin and Atul have ensured that there is huge demand for TCT plays, but that also means they have to produce them in a hurry. For instance, some viewers thought the latest shows of Noises Off, one of his earliest plays revived on such demand, were not up to par. “It seemed like they had not rehearsed enough,” says Munish.
Urban Indian theater often seems like one big wide clique where no one speaks ill of each other – to get to any actual critiques of Atul’s work, I had to really probe. All the criticism is quickly drowned out by a wave of praise that comes the minute one mentions his name. And then I find someone who has been away from the theater scene for over 10 years, though once, many years ago, he and Atul were what can loosely be termed rivals. Vijay Krishna Acharya, director of Dhoom 3, and Atul Kumar were contemporaries in college and while Atul was doing theater at Hansraj, Vijay was at Kirori Mal College. “Back then, each thought one was just mildly better than the other,” he laughs, “but then theater is the playground of the young, when you don’t have to earn money or feed children, you get into theater, it’s like a nasha, what I find incredible about Atul is that he is managing to do a great job of it even now.”
When Atul came to Bombay, he directed Vijay for a show of Noises Off in 2003, which is also the last time Vijay did theater. “As his contemporary, I don’t look at him through rose-tinted glasses, but the effort and enterprise that he brings to his productions are beyond criticism,” he says, “Atul is a great explorer of things, and that is his strength.”
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Atul never takes time off, never talks about anything other than theater, making life tough for Noor, his eight-year-old daughter (from his second marriage), and Rachel D’Souza, his third wife whom he just married last month. “Our house in Bombay never sleeps,” says Rachel, “at any given point there are about 20 people in the house, talking, reading, writing theater.” Ten years ago, Atul’s passion for theater attracted Rachel to him. “When I was 19, to see someone who is so consumed with his work was really awe-inspiring. Now, it is a bit irritating,” she laughs ruefully. That passion has eaten into their personal time and space.
Rachel now spends most of her time working the land at the Kamshet residency. Farming is her way out from theater. “Till I was 24-25, I was also equally passionate about theater but now I feel there should be some balance,” she says, “I try to draw him into different things. I want to experience a lot of other things.” But it doesn’t happen. “He sees me working on the farm, trying to work on the new lotus pond, but he doesn’t get involved.”
Talking to Rachel made me wonder why women want to marry a man already taken by his work. “It is difficult,” she admits, “a double-edged sword.” She also enjoys his madness, his blind love for theater. “If he gets an idea, no matter how insane, how impossible, there is no talking Atul out of it,” she says. “I love that.”
Even discounting theater’s clannishness, Atul is a great friend. What he lacks in time, he makes up for with gestures and dependability. “He would leave handwritten postcards with personal messages for all actors after a play,” remembers Munish. Atul shows a flicker of this sensitivity to me by never naming his earlier wives or girlfriends – all theater actors – and when I find out who they are, he insists I don’t name them to “spare them awkwardness”. We almost have an argument, which ends with him convincing me that naming them adds nothing to my profile while it saves the women, especially his second wife who is a Bollywood actor, unsolicited attention. “Atul has this great knack of convincing people,” says Nimi Ravindran, one of his best friends, who lives in Bangalore. “He convinced me to take three months unpaid leave from my India Today job to work with him when he directed the Ranga Shankara festival in 2004,” she exclaims, still unbelieving, “he also convinced 70 other people to drop everything and work with him!”
Nimi thinks Atul’s most attractive quality is that he thinks big and makes people think out of the box, try to achieve more than they can. “He’s like family to me, so I can’t see the sexual energy,” Nimi says, “but I know many women find him attractive.”
During our conversation, I learn that actor Sadiya Siddiqui is making a documentary on Atul’s life. This is strange. While he is well known in the theater world, Atul is not exactly Amitabh Bachchan – and we are not a country to felicitate talent before it is already in-the-face – so why such interest?
“Well, first of all, he is so handsome,” she says. I am not expecting her to be so direct. Then she goes on to tell me her (rather thin) reasons, which make me wonder if her personal admiration for him is the driving force behind this elaborate project. “I wanted to do a short film on something interesting,” she says. “He is the only guy who was doing clowning at this level,” she offers. While this is not true – Rajat Kapoor’s plays have other clowns, such as Vinay Pathak – I give it to her that Atul’s talent is exceptional.
She goes on to tell me that she “got to follow him around with a camera for 2-3 months,” and, when she acted on stage with him for one play, she was “lost in watching him and had to make an effort to remember [her] own scenes”. I leave, staggered.
Today, Atul’s work is important to Indian theater because he has proved that it can become a relevant career option. “I don’t know how he does it but it takes tremendous courage to invest so much in theater,” says Naseeruddin Shah. “His sticking his neck out and doing such great work has been an important contribution to Indian theater.” Sanjoy Roy agrees, but feels “more important is that he is creating fabulous original content, even with existing scripts what he does is completely new. As we all know the primary voice in Bombay is Bollywood, and within that reality he has been able to make the theatrical voice important.”
It has been 20 years of TCT. Two years since he realized his big dream of opening a residency. He has acted, directed, won accolades, scholarships, fellowships, awards. He is making money. Is he satisfied?
“Are you joking?” Atul sits up at my question. It is unthinkable for him that I think he’s done all he wanted to do. He laughs in disbelief. “Satisfied? No! There is so much more to do!”
He wants to leave the running of TCT to Sachin and concentrate on acting and directing more. “I want to quickly throw out of the window what I am comfortable with and try something new, experiment, question my work.” He wants to go more improv, do more with music, try something with dance. “I never want to come to that point of satisfaction that you were talking about,” he says. He seems almost scared that one day he might lose interest in theater.
At 45, Atul Kumar feels he still has 10 to 15 years of physical theater left in him. “After that I will start doing realistic drama,” he smiles. “Sit in a chair and cough.”
Appeared on https://in.news.yahoo.com/why-atul-kumar-is-house-full-100141409.html
Kalyani Prasher 