Sir Tom Stoppard, who passed away recently, became one of my favourite playwrights after I read Leopoldstadt. This was his last play and first autobiographical work, tracing the loss of his forebears to Hitler’s vile Final Solution. The last scene where the actors chronicle the death of their relatives—one slow name after another, along with the camp in which they were killed—had me sob into my coffee at Koshy’s. I swore I would watch the play live and struck gold when I learnt it was showing at London’s hoary Wyndham’s Theatre in May 2020. (This was where I had watched The Father and The Height of the Storm previously, but more on these anon.) However, COVID struck about then, and my travel plans were cancelled.
I then learnt of it playing a couple of years later in New York and vicariously watched it through friends in the city, who loved the sheer expanse of the cast and the high emotional quotient. Stars finally aligned this May when I was in Vienna, and I got to watch the play at the legendary Theater in der Josefstadt. Minor issue: it was in German. Having read the script many times, I could still follow the gist leading up to the moving crescendo but lost much of the impact of the performances. Theatregoers everywhere in the world seem to carry a keen air of curiosity about them, and the Viennese did not disappoint. But did I sense subtle undercurrents of a lack of empathy for the cause in the audience? Or maybe Austria’s complex history with Nazism influenced my perception.
On the topic of Nazism, I had in late 2024 watched a brilliant John Lithgow (who won his debut Tony Award as far back as 1972) in Giant at the Royal Court Theatre, London. He played an eccentric and mercurial Roald Dahl, fleshing out the author’s subtle condonation of the anti-Semitic causes built on Israel’s attacks on Beirut in 1982. This seemed relevant in a contemporary sense with the genocide in Gaza and had the audience torn. But Dahl came away less villainised than he might have hitherto.
At Kabukiza, the principal theatre in Tokyo for Kabuki.
| Photo Credit:
Aditya Sondhi
It was on this same trip that I watched Samuel Beckett’s timeless masterpiece Waiting for Godot for the umpteenth time. It seems to always get better, especially when directors stay true to the script. There is no point in being experimental with a piece of writing that is inherently absurdist (and lyrical, as some have observed). Of the play Herlen Shaw quips: “Godot is not usually a show where you go aww. It’s a purgatorial vaudeville, a gallows joke for everyone mortal.”
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A Hindi version of Godot at Studio Safdar (founded in memory of the activist Safdar Hashmi, who was killed while performing a piece on the streets of Delhi) was a revelation. Rewriting the script in Hindi is ambitious, and the Étude Production Company did exceptionally well to find the right tonality.
Looking for a play in a new city
My mantra to get to know a new city is to land up at an indie bookstore and then fan out to the streets. Somehow this works like a charm, every time. Dallas’ Deep Vellum, for instance, led me to the edgy, rhyming neighbourhood of Deep Ellum. The next best option to feel the pulse of the city is to look for a play, especially at a quaint theatre.
In Melbourne recently, the Farifax Studio that operates under the Melbourne Theatre Company was home to a solo performance of Dying: A Memoir based on the book by Cory Taylor. The theatre is located close to the French Renaissance style Flinders Station, and the play itself had some of the most slick tech interventions I have ever seen. The actor Genevieve Morris walked through the seats at the start ensuring we had our cell phones on silent! Immersive performance, truly. The script builds on the last few years of an author who is terminally ill with cancer and her witty and poignant reflections on a near, certain end. A Q&A with the audience at the end threw up some interesting perspectives on death, ranging from the fatalist to the Buddhist.
This experiment of plunging into quirky theatre spaces worked well for me in Edinburgh where I signed up to watch the scintillating Ulster American by David Ireland at the compact Traverse Theatre. Post the play, when I was getting a beer at the in-house bar before setting out into the freezing castle-bound streets, I saw a familiar face on the bar stool next to me. Turns out, it was Darrel D’silva the lead actor, who needed a shot to unwind from the fireworks on stage!
At Ranga Shankara, Bengaluru, which featured Yasmina Reza’s brilliant play The Father, with Naseeruddin Shah in the lead.
| Photo Credit:
Aditya Sondhi
Near Traverse is Usher, one of Edinburgh’s oldest theatres, which I didn’t get to visit but whose name I adopted for a theatre circle we ran for a couple of years in Bengaluru, having rehearsed readings of diverse scripts in my living room. Those were nights of unplugged magic. The readings covered Athol Fugard to Vijay Tendulkar, Harold Pinter to Edward Albee. One of the plays we chose was Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett) performed by the effervescent Ashvin Mathew, a day before we went into our first COVID lockdown. I was fortunate to have watched a brilliant Mike Joseph perform it at Jagriti Theatre some years earlier. (“Spoo-ool…, spoo-ool…”. If you know, you know.) Jagriti itself has been home to some memorable performances by Bengaluru’s talented theatre folks. Oleanna, for instance, a two-hander by David Mamet, was brought alive by the splendid pairing of Rebecca Spurgeon and Preetam Koilpillai.
Pre-Usher, we had experimented with a rehearsed reading of Girish Karnad’s first play, Yayati, on the terrace of my aunt’s vintage home in Nandidurga Extension. Actors and lawyers (playing actors) came together under Deepti Sudhindra’s guidance to put together an evening of impromptu theatre that remains special to this day. Although Yayati still remains a powerhouse, and having also watched compelling performances of Karnad’s Tughlaq in Chowdiah Memorial Hall and Ranga Shankara (in English and Kannada), I found that his final play, Crossing to Talikota, did not quite pack the same punch. Truth be told: the scale of the performance drowned the script.
Kabuki in Tokyo was an otherworldly experience. I opted out of the translated headsets to try and take in the performance organically. For starters, the aesthetic of the Kabukiza theatre itself was a direct pathway to my heart. And the folk style performances with noisy climaxes truly brought theatre alive. Even if your Japanese stops at “Arigato gozaimasta”.
At Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris.
| Photo Credit:
Aditya Sondhi
My French is also as many words strong. Yet I made bold to watch a French play called Heat at the Gaumont Champs–Élysées, which I bumped into as a flâneur around the Arc de Triomphe. While it snowed outside, the temperature indoors was turned up to about 35°C (yes, hence, heat) with a bottle of water included with the ticket. Then, a woman took the microphone and recited a script (with two male gymnasts performing to the pace of the recitation), which built up to a trembling orgasm. With mirrors all around and sweat pouring off the actors (and some of us watching), the sheer physicality of the performance remains etched in memory. French, much. An Eugène Ionesco double bill later at Théâtre de la Huchette seemed like light entertainment in comparison.
On an early visit to London, I fell prey to the temptation of watching pop theatre. At £64 for a ticket, I looked forward to soaking in The Phantom of the Opera. The performance played to the gallery and was annoying. Twenty minutes in, I needed to be out. The usher thought I was looking for the loo, but I had other (exit) plans. Moral of the story: do not go to Italy if you are simply seeking pizza.
When in New York, Broadway is an obvious attraction. Not the mainstream musicals for me any longer though. The gripping play The Ferryman written by Jez Butterworth was on at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre—a full three-and-a-half-hour grind of emotion and friction set around the victims of the abuses by the Irish Republican Army on its own people suspected of being traitors. The last scene with the grandmother whispering into nothingness the words “they’re coming, they’re coming…” still makes my hair stand on end.
Good writing and tone-perfect performances
As did the lines from The Father—Yasmina Reza’s brilliant French play in translation by Christopher Hampton—when the dementia-struck protagonist pleads to the audience: “What is my position here?! What is my position!” Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party at the eponymous Harold Pinter Theatre and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had a similar effect: both were tight, living room sets with an emphasis on conversation and good writing, and emotive understated actors with visceral interludes. Night after night, the actors deliver tone-perfect performances and stirring monologues. After one of these shows, basking in the beauty of the evening’s show, I was treated to being the only passenger on a double-decker bus back to Pimlico from Charing Cross. For those 20-odd minutes on the ride home, I truly felt like I owned London.
At Theatre Royal Haymarket, London. Night after night in London’s theatres, actors delivered tone-perfect performances and stirring monologues.
| Photo Credit:
Aditya Sondhi-
The Father also came to Ranga Shankara with Naseeruddin Shah in the lead—perhaps the only time the management charged Rs.2,000 for a ticket! Reza’s God of Carnage had brought the house down at Jagriti some years earlier. And in 2015, we staged five shows of her play Art as an old boys’ performance during the sesquicentennial celebrations of Bishop Cotton Boys’ School. Bishop Cotton’s old hall was where Bangalore Little Theatre debuted—a hall that the thespian Vijay Padaki credited with having some of the best acoustics in the city (we knew that first hand from growing up and putting up inter-house plays in school). Sadly, the hall was razed to the ground some years ago.
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On visits to Prague and Almaty, I stood wide-eyed outside their majestic opera houses but regrettably did not end up watching anything live. Jeff Daniels played Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird at the historic Shubert Theatre in Manhattan, where for the first time I noticed a standing section where guests could rest their arms on padded counters (at a fifth of the price of a full ticket). The play itself was a 7/10, although it was uplifting to see crowds snaking out into the winter sun waiting to watch good theatre. The Shubert Theatre received a bomb scare in 1979 during a staging of A Chorus Line. Walking around the theatre district in New York brought alive vibes of Birdman, whose poster hangs on my wall. Films based on plays is a topic to be separately savoured. Remember August Wilson’s Fences with the outstanding pairing of Viola Davis and Denzel Washington?
A play I watched with some trepidation was my own—Famagusta—performed at the Dara Shukhoh auditorium at the Partition Museum in Delhi. Brilliantly adapted by the director Vikramjeet Sinha and his young cast, and well-received by two full houses, I was happy to have some fingernails intact at the end. All said, I remain a sucker for good theatre and have been enriched watching plays over my travels in different parts of the world. More than anything, the purity of silently watching actors display their magnificence in a hall full of intent spectators aligns one’s soul onto a blissful plane. And as for the actors themselves, it is important that we tell tales of their brilliance. To borrow from Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser (Act Two): “Talk of me sometimes. Speak well of me. Actors live on only in the memory of others. Speak well of me.”
Aditya Sondhi is a senior advocate based in Delhi.
