Recently in town to perform his latest directorial play Once Upon A Murder on a chilly evening at the Pala Hall of ITC Sonar, Husain with his fellow actors from the Stagedoor theatre-troupe presented a murder-mystery, exactly two years after he rendered Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap in Kolkata. The play was sponsored by Aircel and its duration was 90 minutes.
He termed the current script as a “thriller with a twist and dark humour” and though it didn’t fall short of gripping the spectators with a nail-biting suspense on the edge of their seats, yet the whodunnit seemed a bit under-rehearsed in phases as it gradually unfolded.
It was a near family affair as his better-half Virat Talwar, also a gifted stage actress alongwith son Ghulam Ali Abbas and daughter Kaniz Sukaina (both made a debut appearance) were featured in pivotal roles in the play. Characters like Ann Ratford, Jack, Edward, Jeffery, Susan, Mitsy stand out in the play. There’s also an interesting cinematic-literary allusion in the form of Shakespeare and Hitchcock through the investigator’s name ‘Alfred Falstaff’ in the narrative.
Widely acclaimed for his grand-scale outdoor productions like The Fifty Day War based on the Kargil fight, The Legend of Ram revolving around the epic of Ramayana, The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie which is also the world’s longest-running play, One into Two, Move Over and the most recently staged,Lion in the Winter, Husain is credited with holding over 150 productions and lodging humongously 5,000 performances till date. Recipient of the prestigiousPadma Shri in 2001 by the Government of India, his plays have more often than not been attended by a select high-profile gathering of prime ministers, presidents, chief ministers and film-stars of the nation.
Recollecting his long-sustained association with the domain of dramatics, Husain confirms that his honeymoon with ‘all things theatrical’ had begun at school during his ‘happy salad’ days being spent on the esteemed campus of Mayo College in Ajmer. Later, this fascination got more consolidated at the St. Stephens College of Delhi where he went to graduate in history. “We used to have long dining tables in our school mess I remember, and the head of our English Department Rajendra Sibal sir had one fine day announced at the table that he would be interested to cast some of us students as actors for our school play owing to shortage of some people. The play in question was the very famous and the lightest Shakespearean comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was quite overjoyed to get the part of Tom Snout, a fictional characterin the piece. It was a fun-role indeed,” he gleefully recalls. To the uninitiated, Snout was a tinker and one of the “mechanicals” of Athens, who were amateur players in Pyramus and Thisbe, a play within the play. Snout played a wall that separated the lovers Pyramus’ and Thisbe’s gardens, who would whisper to each other through Snout’s fingers (representing a chink in the wall).
Thereafter he did a couple of plays under the aegis of renowned theatre directors Barry John and Joy Michael. But it was the able guidance of Marcus Murch that had made all the difference to his life. “It was a learning experience all throughout. The lessons were thorough and well-taught. The tutelage only aroused my deep-seated hunger and passion for theatre,” he acknowledges.
Incidentally, the first person to direct him was believe it or not, Shashi Tharoor (noted author-politician and an MP from Kerala), who was a couple of years senior to Husain. The play had incorporated a series of excerpts from Catch 22, a satirical novel by American author Joseph Heller. Good news is that he had picked up the Best Fresher Actor Award for his performance in college back then. “Interestingly, we went onto do a lot of plays together. I can still clearly rewind my memory to watch Shashi playing Anthony and Mira Nair (now reputed Indian-American filmmaker based out of New York) in Cleopatra’s shoes while myself as Pompeii in Anthony and Cleopatra,” he grows nostalgic in tone.
In a way, he confides that he could in person successfully “break away those stereotypical barriers in terms of space and has created big cities, mountain-ranges, large sets, panoramic visual appeal — visibly similar to cinema with of course, originality of content as its most precious criterion.”
“We built huge hills, employed earth-moving equipment, planted trees, burnt planes into homes and flew helicopters across for our mammoth war-related productions,” he elaborates ahead. Over the years, the pains he took and the sweat of the brow he shed, have all catapulted him to a hard-core professional level from that of a raw amateur. “Quality evolves with systematic team work and our battery of skilled assistant directors and production managers have always pitched in their 100 per cent even when technology was absent when we had commenced 43 years ago in 1974,” he vouches for his group.
Although he himself delves into open-air renditions, yet Husain is not a generous appreciator of street theatre. “For I feel, the medium needs organised training to come up trumps,” pat comes his advice as a parting shot.