Interview with Atul Kumar

Jennifer Marshall

18 March 2010, 21:00

As it turns out, renowned Indian director, Atul Kumar, and I have had similar mornings, each of us having sent our toddlers off to school amidst a flurry of early-morning activity, although my morning ended 12 hours ago. America is a distant memory for Kumar, who lived in California for two years “a long time back”. He talks to me down a crackling line from Bombay about his play, The Blue Mug, and about what memories mean to him.

You’ve described The Blue Mug as a ‘true reflection of experimental theatre”. Tell me about your directing process and what you consider to be the experimental nature of the play?

In Indian theatre we are very used to doing scripted theatre, reading scripts written down by writers whereas this play does not have a script to begin with. Secondly, it uses devices inspired by the book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. We have taken a few ideas from that book and we have improvised and created this play. We don’t have any sets, we don’t have any properties. We just have actors on stage narrating their own personal memories.

How do the characters in your play mirror the characters in the book?

The book contains clinical entries written by Oliver Sacks, a neurologist from England, and these are real case studies. When we studied the book we found out that most of the patients described in the book are suffering from memory loss and from there we got the idea of investigating our own memory loss. The actors went on stage during rehearsals and they explored their own memories and things that they had forgotten.

How did you encourage the actors to access and confront their own memories?

Well it was not easy to begin with. The whole process started looking like a therapy session actually but then we are friends and have been working together for the last 15 to 20 years so there was a certain level of ease with each other. Memories which sometimes the actors were not aware of themselves starting come up, things which they had censored themselves. We started slowly moving into an area which was not very comfortable but then we started opening our hearts to each other. Then the problem was which memories to keep and which not to and in that process we arrived at the structure of the play.

What were the common themes that emerged during those brainstorming sessions?

The larger themes that stayed in the play finally were extreme banal childhood memories when kids in India used to play in open spaces on the terraces, their first love, their first kisses and more violent memories, memories beyond oneself, where one was a part of a larger existing memory or ancient memory. Memories moved from smaller to larger, from personal, to very banal. Sometimes the memories were extremely funny, sometimes extremely grave.

Is the reliability of memory a concept that you explore in the play?

Yes we do, we also realize that it’s completely scientific, that we obviously can’t remember everything. It is equally important to forget as it is to remember and we realize that we are also made of the fact that we forget. We discover that all memories are actually false, its an act of imagination, we make it up as we go along.

Is there a particular memory of your own that has influenced your choice of career or directing style that you could share with us?

I can’t possibly tell you one but I can tell you one billion. There are just too many things, if I close my eyes I can tell you at least ten thousand things right away that influenced my choice of career today. Right from my childhood when I started doing theatre, when I travelled, when I wrote for different directors, when I went to the theatre school to the people I met, to the plays I saw, to the books I read. There are so many memories which have altogether formed who I am today. I suppose one of the most powerful memories is a four-year-old memory, which is when my daughter was born. I always feel that has been my favourite creation.

Special thanks to Ashutosh Gupta for arranging the interview.

Mediasphere and Shailja productions presents The Blue Mug: About Memories and What We Make of Them featuring Bollywood stars Konkona Sen Sharma, Rajat Kapoor, Ranvir Shorey, Vinay Pathak, Sheeba Chadha, and Munish Bhardwaj. The play comes to Anaheim on May 9, 2010. Visit www.thebluemugplay.com or call (562) 860-1135 for details.

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