Shabana Azmi talks about the challenges she faced portraying two characters in Girish Karnad's play Broken Images. Unnati Joshi does an email chat
She stands out as a woman of substance and style, who has excelled in both on-screen performances and living out her causes. less glamorous but more compelling characters are Shabana Azmi’s legacy that has altered the grammar of presenting women in the mainstream space. Now she is all set to stage her play, Broken Images, in Delhi.
The play is about two sisters, one an intellectually brilliant paraplegic, the other a plodding writer, who live under the same roof, dependent on each other but inhabiting different emotional as well as linguistic worlds.
Shabana plays both the sisters and their many images as they morph into one another. She has played a multitude of roles on the big screen but she believes that this was the most challenging role of her career.
“The play is a psychological thriller written beautifully by Girish Karnad and directed by Alyque Padamsee who has even worked with my mother. The morphing of the characters is very challenging. It’s one of the most challenging roles I’ve played. Malini is a pre-recorded image on the TV screen and Manjula is the live character on stage. I had to do Malini in one single shot of 44 minutes and I got it right in the first take. It is a first in my career,” she said.
“The timing is crucial. Also, if I make a mistake while playing Manjula, I have no co-star to rescue me because Malini is a pre-recorded image. It requires fierce concentration. There is a lot of effort and research involved in playing any character, irrelevant to the time period,” added she.
Asked which character does she relate to more, she promptly said, “Manjula Nayak. She is not a very successful short-story writer. She suddenly becomes wealthy and internationally famous by writing a best-seller in English. A little-known face in Hindi, she has now acquired an international image and has inherited problems of loyalty and betrayal. All of us can relate to both, Manjula and Malini in a little way; we’ve all got positives and negatives, we are flawed in some way. That’s what makes us human.”
Though she has worked extensively in theatre, people know her more for her films. Which medium is closest to herIJ “Both are equally very dear to me. However, theatre has been an integral part of my life, it is as important as films are to me. However, what theatre does to you is it allows you to connect with the audience. On camera, you do have a chance to redeem yourself if you make a mistake and in theatre everything is live and that’s what is challenging for an artist. That’s an exciting part where you learn a lot about improvisation, practice and rehearsals! Theatre is very powerful,” she gushed.
Talking about her rehearsals, Shabana concluded, “Alyque worked with my mother Shaukat Kaifi 40 years ago and it’s remarkable that he is still going strong. Nothing misses his eye. He directs his actors very closely and helps when you get stuck. He also has a strong sense of the audience’s pulse.. Girish is one of our best playwrights. He has a lot of subtext that you discover anew as you go along.”