Many years ago, Naseeruddin Shah had acted in an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s raucous musical The Threepenny Opera. “That was around the time he was in National School of Drama,” Imaad Shah tells us. Now, years later, his actor and musician son is directing the very same play for the Aadyam stage, as his directorial debut. This is the seventh and final production to be staged under the Aadyam banner this year. While the premiere of the play happened yesterday in Mumbai and has another show there tonight, it will also be staged in Delhi soon.
Well, his father might not be in this play with him but his brother, Vivaan, is. Also, one-half of his Electro-Funk /Nu Disco band Madboy-Mink, Saba Azad is also acting in the play. With so much pressure of doing a path-breaking play as The Threepenny Opera as his first as a director, combined with the heavy-duty lineage he comes from, does having family around help? “Well, the whole cast has become family for me now,” says Imaad, while admitting that having family around does matter. “They have all stepped up and gone beyond the call of duty. They have really been involved from a creative and production standpoint,” he adds.
Let the music play
For Imaad, the process of getting involved with the material of the play began almost two years ago. “I started working with the musicians, analysing the music, breaking down the arrangements and thinking how do I want to work with the music. I have been told that it is after a really long time in the Indian theatre scene, at least in terms of non Hindustani classical musicals, to have completely live music being played on stage,” he says. And while there have been numerous adaptations of the play, for Imaad, the play is not the same without the original music by Kurt Weill. “The music is the soul of the play, and so, we have retained all the original music in our shows,” he says.
Accessible and entertaining
The world of The Threepenny Opera revolves around beggars, prostitutes, thieves, corrupt policemen and gangsters. “It’s about people on the margins of society. And it could have been easy to transpose it to the Indian setting, but we felt that that would be going down hardcore realism and then it would become all about the milieu. And because it’s a very specific milieu in our country, you can’t do it justice without going down the path of realism. So we kept the original music, played with the jazz music and choreography and built a sort of parallel universe on stage,” he says.
And in keeping with Brecht’s philosophy, as well as his father’s, Imaad feels that one is barking up the wrong tree if one is trying to create realistic effects on stage. “I think it is more fun to use the stage for what it’s worth and use theatrical devices. So here, we have various characters playing the role of the sutradhar, who enters once in a while and comments on the primary stuff. We have also tried to keep it really entertaining and accessible because that’s the main thing about this play. It’s not some esoteric thing. It needs to be communicated clearly and be entertaining because that’s what it is,” he signs off.
