‘How’s the drama?’ any 9-5 person I would meet after a gap would think it’s a nice way to question, taunt and laugh at the same time. This question used to infuriate me, back in 2012, when I was 18 and recently shifted to Ahmedabad.
There was a friend, who, when found out about my acting aspirations and theatre company, ‘Akshat Drama Group’, went on a rant about the fruitlessness of the entertainment industry.
I listened, silently, because somewhere, I had a feeling that her unprovoked bitterness was raging from some personal experience.
This is a years-old memory, which came to my thoughts, in 2022, when I was reading and underlining this paragraph from a book, ‘There Are No Secrets’ by Peter Brook:
“… I’m telling this story to share with you a fundamental idea: theatre has no categories, it is about life. This is the only starting point, and there is nothing else truly fundamental. Theatre is life.
At the same time, one cannot say that there is no difference between life and theatre. In 1968 we saw people who, for very valid reasons, tired by so much ‘deadly theatre’, insisted that ‘life is a theatre’, thus there was no need for art, artifice, structures… ‘Theatre is being done everywhere, theatre surrounds us,’ they said.
‘Each of us is an actor, we can do anything in front of anyone, it’s all theatre’…”
All my friends, and students, who someday, secretly harboured a desire to perform, on a stage, any stage, a road or a hall, have listened to someone telling them, ‘Everybody is acting only’ or something similar, to discourage the art of being an actor.
What Peter Brook does, is explain, ‘What is wrong with this statement?’
I highlighted the question and read on.
“… A simple exercise can make it very clear. Ask any volunteer to walk from one side of a space to another. Anyone can do this. The clumsiest idiot cannot fail, he just has to walk. He makes no effort and deserves no reward. Now ask him to try to imagine that he is holding a precious bowl in his hands and to walk carefully so as not to spill a drop of its contents. Here again anyone can accomplish the act of imagination that this requires and can move in a more or less convincing manner. Yet your volunteer has made a special effort, so perhaps he deserves thanks and a five-penny piece as a reward for trying. Next ask him to imagine that as he walks the bowl slips from his fingers and crashes to the ground, spilling its contents. Now he’s in trouble. He tries to act and the worst kind of artificial, amateur acting will take over his body, making the expression on his face ‘acted’ – in other words, woefully unreal. To execute this apparently simple action so that it will appear as natural as just walking demands all the skills of a highly professional artist – an idea has to be given flesh and blood and emotional reality: it must go beyond imitation, so that an invented life is also a parallel life, which at no level can be distinguished from the real thing. Now we can see why a true actor is worth the enormous daily rate that film companies pay him for giving a plausible impression of everyday life…”
And I was reminded of some great films, plays and names of the faces, credited and uncredited.
That friend of mine was an engineer and had auditioned, once upon a time, in a dance reality show. Each of us has a story, of rejection and childhood.
Book: The slyness of boredom by Peter Brook
Credit: A birthday gift from Sandeep Khatik, a theatre teacher and director in Akshat Drama Group.
While researching Peter Stephen Paul Brook, I found his interview where he talks about, “his first production days and not knowing anything about direction whatsoever!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL2AikZZ5OY