Mahesh Dattani spoke to Iknoor Kaur about converting his oldest production into a cineplay and how it is by far the best representation of the script
Twenty five years ago Mahesh Dattani wrote the script of Dance like A Man. Sixteen years ago he staged it in Bengaluru for the first time. Ten years ago he turned it into a film. And today, after over 500 stage shows and international acclaim, he will screen it as a cineplay at India Habitat Centre this weekend. But what is a cineplayIJ “As the name suggests, it is the filming of a play — a digitised version. While it is cinema, it’s not an adaptation of the play. Instead, the play has been shot the way it is performed on stage. Without taking away the theatrical quality, cineplay adds a cinematic touch,” explains Dattani who feels that of all the three types of media he has presented this script through, cineplay’s been the best. He says, “The stage production focussed on the universal man-woman relationship and the patriarchal concept. It was very intrapersonal. The film, on the other hand, focussed on the dance aspect. Shobana who played the lead role in the film was a well-known dancer and there were extensive dancing scenes. Also, the characters reflected their angst in their dance. However, cineplay managed to capture the universality of the stage production along with certain nuances in acting which one misses out on stage. It captured the essence of the script.”
Dance like A Man is one of Dattani’s oldest productions, thus for the cineplay, he didn’t change anything in it. “The play has been retained the way it is. Also, here you don’t have shot breakdowns unlike a film. It maintains the energy and flow of the stage play. So even if the cameras are moving and cutting from shot to shot, it is still a stage play,” he shares.
Filmmaking is a very technical medium which does disrupt the flow, he adds. “The lights may be wrong, the camera may not have moved at the right time or the focus may not have shifted correctly — there are problems which upset the flow of the play while shooting, so there were retakes. But honestly it was like a rehearsal. When we rehearse a play and something goes wrong, we redo an entire unit. The only difference here was that we were redoing small bits,” he elaborates.
However, when it came to continuity, the cast of Dance like A Man (Suchitra Pillai, Joy Sengupta, lillete Dubey and Vijay Crishna) never went wrong. “The actors have done almost 500 shows, so I think they could do it even in their sleep. So continuity was never a problem because they could do the same thing over and over again. The main thing was to retain the theatrical energy and be aware of the fact that a camera can pick up even the minutest detail. We were trying to get the best of both rather than compromise on either,” says Dattani.
Though many people feel that concepts like cineplay may take the viewer away from enjoying live theatre, Dattani feels that it will help engross more people in live theatre. He shares, “Cineplay can reach places where live productions can’t. As an English theatre company we focus on cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai and sometimes Hyderabad and Chandigarh. But cineplay can travel anywhere. Honestly if I saw a cineplay and liked it, I would want to see it live. Also Dance like A Man is on the English syllabus of many Indian universities and in Canada and US. Students who are studying the texts have absolutely no idea how it comes across on stage. Cineplay can reach out to them and they can study the text in terms of its performance as well.” He is also converting two of his other plays into cineplays. “Right now I’m planning to work on Where There Is A Will, which was the first play I wrote and then later Final Solutions as well,” he informs.
Apart from cineplays, Dattani is reviving two of his stage plays — “The Big Fat City, which I want to now take abroad and The Alchemist, which should be out again by June,” he sums up.