Breaking character: A Wknd interview with theatre director Feroz Abbas Khan
His Mughal-e-Azam was a lavish spectacle. His new production, Letters of Suresh, is different; minimalist. ‘It’s unlike anything I’ve done in years,’ he says.
This time last year, theatre director Feroz Abbas Khan was touring the US with Mughal-e-Azam: The Musical, which is often described as India’s most expensive stage production.
It has a cast and crew of over 150, more than 500 costumes, and sets so extravagant, they were ferried around in eight 55-ft-long containers.
Earlier in 2023, Khan had written and directed The Great Indian Musical: Civilization to Nation, a spectacle created for the opening of the 2,000-seat, state-of-the-art Grand Theatre at Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC). It traced the history of the performing arts in India, through a cast of 381 actors and dancers and a crew of more than 700. “These were both just huge challenges. By the end of our US tour, I was quite drained,” says Khan, laughing.
It was at this point that he read the American playwright Rajiv Joseph’s latest work, Letters of Suresh (2021). For days after, he couldn’t stop thinking about it, he says, with its unusual grammar and its monologues by four characters hungering for human connection.
“This is a play focused on the writing and the actors, and nothing else,” he says. “Not only is it beautifully written and unique in form, it is unlike anything I’ve done in years.”
The 65-year-old Khan, after all, is now best-known for his “blockbusters”, a term rarely used for theatrical productions in India. His two-hour-thirty-minute Mughal-e-Azam (2016) tells the tale of the ill-fated love between a future emperor and a slave girl in vivid, almost-cinematic vibrancy.
His Tumhari Amrita (Your Amrita; 1992) was visually stark, but the letters that the two star-crossed lovers (played by Shabana Azmi and Farooq Shaikh) read out on stage were so compelling that the play toured the world for over 20 years, its run only ending when Shaikh died in 2013. (Adapted by Javed Siddiqui, from AR Gurney’s Love Letters (1988), the letters span 35 years, starting with one written by Amrita to Zulfi when she was eight.)
***
Letters of Suresh is a 90-minute play with no intermission. Its characters are an unusual mix: Suresh, an origami prodigy; Father Hashimoto, a Catholic priest who survived the Nagasaki bombing; Melody, his great-grandniece, who teaches creative writing; and Amelia, a wife and homemaker whose quiet life has recently been upended by an affair with Suresh. The characters seek each other out through letters, texts and, in one case, a video call.
“I knew, almost as soon as I read it, that I wanted to direct this one,” says Khan. “But it is a play that reads beautifully, so the challenge is to perform it better than it reads; to enrich the experience for the audience.”
Khan’s staging makes its India debut at NMACC’s intimate, 250-seat Studio Theatre on May 9. Its cast consists of Palomi Ghosh (who won a National Award for a Konkani musical in 2015), Vir Hirani (a recent graduate of RADA, the UK’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and son of filmmaker Rajkumar Hirani), actor Harssh Singh (Thappad, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Raman Raghav 2.0) and actor-producer Radhika Sawhney.
It’s a bit of a full-circle moment for Khan. Before his mega-productions, his oeuvre was predominantly minimalist and intimate.
Kuch Bhi Ho Sakta Hai (Anything Can Happen; 2005), for instance, was a two-and-a-half-hour solo performance in which Anupam Kher talked about his life, career and lessons he learnt along the way. Salesman Ramlal (2013; an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman), starred the late Satish Kaushik as a man attempting to come to terms with his failings, and regret.
Khan is hoping that Letters of Suresh will mark a return to pared-down storytelling that touches the heart and stays with the viewer. “It would, in some ways, be easier for me to do another big production, to do more of that kind of work. But to make the complex accessible is what makes me the happiest,” he says.
***
Khan began his career as an actor in 1979, while in college. He headed Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre through most of the 1980s; and he made his directorial debut with a 1990 staging of Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun, a tale of ruin and gold.
He has always aimed for excellence, he says. So, for Mughal-e-Azam, he had about 30 dancers shift base to Mumbai for rehearsals, two months before the show opened. The crew for The Great Indian Musical included the two-time Tony Award-winning lighting designer Donald Holder and award-winning production designer Neil Patel.
The second of those projects was so well-received that, instead of two shows in March last year, it ran for 25, then returned for another 30 in September-October. “Even though they were high-priced tickets, the shows sold out very quickly. When people are ready to pay that kind of money, it’s because they want to watch something special,” Khan says, smiling.
He can’t say he enjoyed any of it at the time, he adds with a laugh. “It’s almost excruciating for me to watch my own productions because if there’s even a small pause or something tiny that goes wrong, it affects me,” he says. Unlike, say, cinema, Khan can’t do anything about missteps during a performance. “But I take copious notes,” he adds. “Everybody gets notes. Even Shabana (Azmi) and Farooqsahab (Shaikh) used to get notes at intermission, and after the show.”
Is it more excruciating when there are literally thousands of moving parts, as in Mughal-e-Azam? “Three days before we opened, I thought that was the worst thing I had done in my life, because it felt like everything was falling apart,” he says, laughing again.
But, “at the time, I wanted to do something that was world-class, as good as a Broadway musical, but with an Indian story. Interestingly, the film Mughal-e-Azam (1960; produced and directed by K Asif) was inspired by the play Anarkali (1922; written by Imtiaz Ali Taj), so the musical is also the story’s return to its original medium.”
Khan is already planning his next move. “I feel a great desire to do films. Of course, I feel more comfortable doing theatre because it allows me more freedom to do the kind of work I believe in. But I have a couple of ideas and it’s just a matter of time before I take that plunge,” he says.
Previous films have met with limited success. His cinematic debut, Gandhi, My Father (2007; based on his play Mahatma vs Gandhi, about the tensions between Gandhi and his eldest son Hiralal, particularly over personal decisions imposed on the family) was well-received critically but not commercially. His second, Dekh Tamasha Dekh (2014; a dark comedy about the chaos that ensues after a drunk man is crushed under a life-sized cutout of a politician), sank without a trace. “I am very proud of both. When I look back, I feel like maybe they were before their time,” Khan says.
He has written three new plays as well, but decided to stage Letters… first, since it presents the most interesting challenge. “This play has a grammar I haven’t worked with before,” Khan says. “After 40 years in the business, you develop certain skills and instincts. But it’s also exciting to feel that fear and learn something new at this stage.”