Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
A double serving
|
Theatre veterans and founders of Akshara Theatre, Jalabala Vaidya and Gopal Sharman share their passion and a meal
|
Photo: V. Sudershan
MOMENTS THAT MATTER Gopal Sharman and Jalabala Vaidya at The Metropolitan hotel’s Chutney restaurant in New Delhi
Their play, “Ramayana” has been performed more than 2,500 times across the world. Their daughter was the first female artist and first foreigner to light Broadway. They staged protest plays during the Emergency. Their Akshara Theatre rose
from a chance performance before the then President S. Radhakrishnan. Meet Jalabala Vaidya and Gopal Sharman, a couple whose personal incidents are events of history.
Over food
At a sumptuous lunch at Chutney, The Metropolitan hotel in New Delhi, the couple flips through time, scurries through memories and rests finally with philosophies. Usually choosing only salad for lunch, they try to do justice to the elaborate menu. After some persuasion these strict vegetarians narrow in on hara kabab, Turkyani biryani and vilayati salad.
Afraid of dropping the papri-chaat appetiser on his shirt, Sharman looks at his wife and says, “The un-manifest sends many angels. My first angel was Jalabala. I don’t know what I would have done without her. All these angels are beautiful.” She smiles a small smile at this truism.
They focus on the conversation over the food. But they add, “This is a feast”. They marvel at the fragrant biryani, which comes draped in bread. They enjoy the hara kabab with its delicate taste of spinach and cheese. Jalabala confirms, “This is very unusual and tasty.”
The history
They slowly peal away the background of The Akshara Theatre. It was built adjacent to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, around 20 years ago. In the heart of the city, this pearl of a space contains three different performance areas. A fifty-seat and a hundred-seat staging area have been built completely in-house by Sharman. The hand of an artiste is evident in the intimacy and perfection of the auditoriums.
But their collaboration dates back to the sixties. Enjoying the different kinds of rotis, the chef’s speciality at Chutney, Sharman recounts, “It all began with a performance by Jalabala at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.” Impressed by Sharman’s newspaper column, President Radhakrishanan asked to meet the author. It was decided that Jalabala would read some of Sharman’s pieces for the President. When the invitation came, it only read Jalabala’s name and Sharman refused to go. But the President was so impressed by Jalabala that he immediately organised a performance for the couple in Rome. A whiz with dates, Vaidya interjects here, “The year was 1967.” Their performance “Full Circle” ran to full houses. They got the lead story in the Rome papers, dethroning Joan Baez who had performed the same night! They had travelled to Rome on a one-way ticket. They now bought a Volkswagen with the money from the show, so that they could drive back to India.
On the way back they performed in Germany and Yugoslavia. They were also invited by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Looking at Sharman, Jalabala adds, “This was the fairytale bit.”
Picking through the asparagus and zucchini in the salad, she speaks of Sharman’s work with a reverence of a fellow artist and the loyalty of a wife. “‘Ramayana’ is remarkable in the way Gopal has written it,” adding, “all the characters are treated within the limits of being a human being. I was blessed that there was a strike and all the actors left and I had to do it myself.”
Choosing only earl grey tea and no dessert, the couple says that they are now working on poetry films but more crucially on a purely intellectual channel. “TV could encourage people to think more into their own tradition,” says this thinker-couple straight out of an Aristotelian fairytale.
NANDINI NAIR
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
|
