Alkazi’s first contact with the theatre came after school in St Vincent’s, Poona, when he joined St Xavier’s College in Bombay. Here, the Shakespeare Society met once a week, directed by Sultan ‘Bobby’ Padamsee, a towering figure just back from Oxford after dodging the German submarines on the way. Soon, Alkazi found himself cast in Padamsee productions: Othello (opening on the bedchamber scene with Othello slaying Desdemona, and then proceeding in flashbacks), Macbeth and Twelfth Night. Later would come Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Lajos Biro’s God and Kings.
Here was a Poona youth, feeling a bit of a yokel, cast among the sophisticates of Bombay. Yet there was no reason for the discomfort. He was brought up in a family of affluent Arab merchants. His father never learned an Indian language or felt at home in English but Alkazi had been sent to a prestigious Jesuit school. He shared a reasonably similar background with his fellow ‘Shakespeareans’.
By the age of 23, this man had stood on its head the artistic life of a very cosmopolitan city, and not just in theatre. Poetry, prose, painting, criticism and an active salon of young thinkers and creators were all part of Padamsee’s disruptive sweep. Sadly, the flame burned too brightly to last very long.
Also read: Remembering Ebrahim Alkazi, the Master Who Helped Shape Modern Indian Theatre
In 1952, I acted in Alkazi’s wonderful production of Anouilh’s Antigone. Alkazi elicited two of the finest performances that I have seen anywhere from his principals, Pheroza Cooper (Antigone) and Hamid Sayani (Creon). Alkazi himself was the Chorus. It was a carefully graded exercise of rising intensity of performance in this new version of the Greek classic. It was an instructive technical and emotional experience for us all.
Pheroza was a composed young woman. We watched attentively as Alkazi provoked her with examples and parallels to heights of fury and violence at a great distance from the serene person we knew. It was also my first experience of a production where movement was more choreographed than just ‘blocked’.
Not long after Antigone, Alkazi’s restless need for stimulus took him from Bombay to the stirring art scene in London. He had read avidly about it, now he packed his bags and left, with a loan from his father. A close friend gave him a book to read on the voyage to England. It was Mordecai Gorelik’s New Theatres for Old. Alkazi had planned to study art in all its forms in London. Gorelik changed that. His vision and passion for the theatre, excitingly conveyed in the book, had shaken Alkazi’s resolve well before the ship docked in Tilbury.
One day, passing the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he decided to walk in and take his chances. He did so well in an audition and interview that the head of the RADA offered him a freeship, given his empty pockets. His performance as Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest was, for a while, the talk of RADA for its animal physicality.
Despite being offered a drama adviser’s job in a London County and the desire of a leading agency to have him on their books, he reserved two passages to India (“I was homesick”). After spending some three years in London, Alkazi sailed home with Roshen.
Moliere’s Tartuffe, a 1960 production of Alkazi’s Theatre Unit School of Dramatic Arts in Bombay, with the director playing the eponymous character. Photo: Courtesy of the Alkazi Theatre Archives.
He was now free to create the community of theatre that he thought necessary and possible in India. He had seen the Vieux Colombier functioning in Paris, studied the work of Michel St Denis and, in particular, the thinking and approach of Stanislavsky, his Moscow Arts Theatre and the devoted way of life of its members.
In Bombay, he set up the Theatre Unit School of Dramatic Arts. With very little money and no job, he trained interested young people gratis. Theatre in English and the European tradition was a poor relative of Indian language theatre in the city, being amateur in the true sense (amateur equals to he who loves). Perhaps it was this that kindled the passion that resulted in the high quality of Alkazi’s work in these productive years, a kind of theatre that transcended the bounds of language and box office.
The Alkazi school, named the Meghdoot Theatre, was perched on a terrace above his fifth floor flat. It presented numerous productions of high quality, among them Euripides’ Medea, Ben Jonson’s Volpone and several Molieres, notably Tartuffe, in which he also acted the name role and was a huge success. Alkazi’s philosophy was derived from the many sources to which he had been exposed in Europe.
Alkazi was offered the post of director, National School of Drama, under the Ministry of Education and Culture in 1962. He accepted, he says, because he longed to test himself in a national arena. He wanted to work in Indian languages, especially Hindi, his palate stimulated by the Marathi theatre of his Poona and Mumbai days.
Razia Sultan by Balwant Gargi. Directed by Alkazi, the NSD production (with Rohini Hattangadi as Razia and Naseeruddin Shah as Yaqut), was staged at the Purana Qila in Delhi, in 1974. Photo: Courtesy of the Alkazi Theatre Archives.
He had earlier formulated the concept of a national school at the behest of Ashfaque Hussain, then secretary in the Ministry of Education. Over fifteen years of stewardship (1962-77), Alkazi built a national institution with an international reputation. Before him, it had been marked for closure. Notably missing had been the right syllabus, premises, faculty and, most of all, a philosophy or vision. It was a perfect situation for Alkazi and his insatiable appetite for challenges. He ended up building a remarkable institution on certain principles and concepts, many of them brought from Bombay.
Looking back on those years, Alkazi said, “I had always wanted to work with people professionally trained in the same kind of school.”
In Delhi, unlike Bombay, Alkazi had to work in Hindi and the Indian languages. He taught himself how to function in them — not just in bazaar pidgin, but as a director of speech would need to know them. Alkazi also encouraged and re-launched playwrights in Hindi like Mohan Rakesh, whose Aashadh Ka Ek Din he presented at a watershed time in Hindi theatre. He produced Mohan’s Adhe Adhure and Lehron Ke Rajhans. Dharamveer Bharati’s Andha Yug was performed at Ferozshah Kotla in Delhi for a thousand people, from whom a roar of ‘Krishna Maharaj ki jai’ was heard when Gandhari uttered her famous curse.
Gerson da Cunha is the doyen of Mumbai’s theatre and advertising scene.
