TV icons Sarmad Khoosat and Nimra Bucha team up for theatre
When two versed actors are paired up in the same piece, all you really need to do is to sit back and be impressed.
Sarmad Khoosat and Nimra Bucha, also the lead actor and director for their three plays, applied all their years in the television industry onto a local stage.
An adaptation from English playwright, Mark Ravenhill’s "Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat", these three plays are exemplifications of security, class, violence and fear, a concept of relevance both proverbial and pertinent to Pakistan.
The three stories interchange artfully with their thoughtful and distinct set-ups, efficaciously playing a card of mystery to heighten their intensity.
With his sturdy build and stride of confidence, Sarmad Khoosat has in him a dominating presence that came through naturally for his role as the perpetrator, so much so that the forewarned expletives are welcomed as complementary to his very expressive enactment. There is no awkwardness behind the coarse dialogues and raw emotions underneath Khoosat’s verbal rampage.
By contrast, we relate to Nimra Bucha’s subtlety in an intricacy and combust that would not translate as well through a flat-panel screen where she is always seen. Bucha takes on the role of both offender and defender, threading the line of affliction and self-preservation like a seasoned theatre connoisseur.
The credit also goes to Mark Ravenhill, a prominent writer-in-residence of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who has in his script, created an impermeable social link between current affairs and domestic lives. With Ravenhill’s "Fear and Misery", "War and Peace", and "Crime and Punishment", one can expect nothing less than a chain of causal and effect underlying his introspective lines.
1. Is this your first time as a director?
No, actually this is my second time doing direction in theatre. The first time I did a show called the “The dictator’s wife”. But I wouldn’t call it direction, it’s a way of coming up with ways of performing a piece, and it’s pretty much the same sort of method in this play as well. The same people who are performing are also directing, so Sarmad and I are in all the plays, and we sort of work together and it’s very unclear who is directing who (laughs).
2. How did you guys decide to collaborate?
We’ve done television before and it’s always him who is directing although he is both an actor and director, because he is more prolific as a director. I worked with him on two television serials. One was “Mera Yaqeen” and the other one was “Main Manto” which we’ve just done recently. So we really wanted to work together on a theatre piece.
He wanted to do theatre; he hasn’t done theatre on this sort of scale before. We knew we were comfortable working with each other, so we tried it out with theatre and he has really enjoyed it, I think. You can ask him (laughs).
3. Why did you choose these three plays?
I saw these plays for the first time in 2007. They were from the Edinburgh festival and they were part of a series called “Ravenhill for Breakfast”, where Mark Ravenhill would write a new play every morning, and you could watch the play over a cup of coffee.
It’s very exciting and contemporary writing, and really relevant to the world that we live in. There are things in this play about class, violence, security, about protecting yourself, and why you need to protect yourself, so in Pakistan, that’s a very relevant thing.
Also, sometimes when you are doing classic plays from writers who are not local, ‘cause you know we don’t have a lot of local scripts, we have to adapt them and translate them, which is quite a long process, especially if you want to get it right. But I felt Ravenhill’s plays are written so naturally that they could be happening anywhere. It could be happening in Pakistan, Beirut, and I know for a fact that they have been performed in Turkey, Italy and Spain.
When we asked for permission for these plays, Mr Ravenhill was very kind, he didn’t charge us any fees for the license and he is very excited that we are doing it in Pakistan.
4. What is the reason for casting your son as one of the side characters?
I think he is good, he is a bit of a drama queen (laughs) but also, the nature of the play is such that it contains very strong language and violence, and I wasn’t sure who would let their child work in a play like this. So I thought, why don’t I just put my own child in the play and see what happens?
He was game and he was very happy to do it, and he’s enjoying himself a lot because he gets to be very rude and very badly behaved (laughs).
5. Are you prepping him for the television industry?
No, no, no, no… there is too much chaos in the television industry for a child to be acting in it. No timings, no real structure for children… I think that’s not a good nurturing place. I would prefer him to study drama and come into acting through theatre.
It is very important for anybody who wants to act to try theatre first, because television acting is very limiting in what you can do. I don’t want to put it down or anything, but it’s more static, it’s more like modeling than acting if you really compare it to what you do in the theatre.
6. The play contains a significant amount of strong language and expletives, is it a sort of catharsis for you in reality?
(laughs) No, I don’t know… To be perfectly honest, the choice is Nimra’s, and there is a really uncanny relevance that you find in them.
I do believe that there is this little streak in all of us which does come out right? Probably just takes the right amount of adrenaline, but as an actor you see strong drama and that does give you the thrill and kick, so yea, I would sort of agree to that.
Strong language has become such an incidental thing, and it goes into the background of that impact, that alliteration, that rhythm, so it becomes overpowering to some degree. Some rehearsals were really exhausting… but you do find a lot of back story within the content.
I am doing theatre after a long time, and on television we don’t deal with a lot of subtext, but as we rehearse this play, it kind of opens up, though of course it’s always there in writing. But you know how it dawns upon you... so that I am experiencing after a long time because you live with that text and you memorise it. It was challenging but it’s the state of being happily exhausted by something.
7. Is this the first time you are directing a theatre piece?
For theatre, yes. But it’s two people and we are doing it in a cozy compact environment, so direction is generally boiled down to a minimalistic lighting design and the sets.
Nimra does stand on a higher ground there because she knows theatre better than I do. It was more like I said ‘okay I take care of the lightings and the technical bits’. But it’s not 'direction-direction', I would say.
8. Would we be expecting more theatre directions from you?
I don’t know. It’s extremely satisfying on various levels. But you see I do television for a living, that’s like my main thing. But I am up for any options.
Television has become kind of passive in terms of your involvement as a director. It is such a team effort and then it has so many phases now. It’s just like there and then, or here and now. So I am enjoying the contact and the organicity (in plays).
9. You are often seen as both an actor and a director, which role do you actually prefer?
In television it’s very different. With the kind of content we are dealing with, acting is an easier job, and it’s in such bits and pieces that you don’t really have to take all that load on.
I believe acting is much more difficult in stage, but yes it’s much more satisfying. So if it’s theatre, I think I would like to act more on stage.
So if it’s television, you would prefer to direct?
I would prefer to direct. That’s where I think the control is with you. I am not saying that you don’t get a lot of opportunities but there are very few to really sort of ‘act-act’ out. It’s generally so oversimplified and generic in the characterisation or the plot, so honestly, there is no great effort that you need to put in. After a project or two, you do get bored with the drill when you are not being challenged enough.
Theatre however, challenges you in any case - on a physical level first of all, the mechanic drill of knowing it by heart. So maybe the novelty is more exciting for me right now, because I would have to challenge myself on stage to see if I can sustain that. I wanted to act (laughs), that’s what I told Nimra, I want to do something that can sort of immerse me. So theatre that is.
Also, I don’t act a lot in my dramas. But in the last bio-drama that I did, “Main Manto”, that’s where I got sort of selfish. I just thought that connection with Manto, I really wanted whoever plays Manto to have that. So I think with “Main Manto”, I did get a little selfish, obsessive and possessive about it.
10. Now that you’ve got your taste in television and theatre, would there be a film coming up?
Oh cinema, it is, I mean, that’s it. That’s it for me, I mean. I wrote a film around nine years ago, and that’s when I really really wanted to move on to cinema. But you see cinema has not been as happening as it should have been…
But with your growing fame in Pakistan, moving on to film would not be that big a problem…
Yea, you see now it’s not just about that. It’s also about what kind of film do you want to launch yourself with, coming from that sort of a background. If I am like a pseudo intellectual, I would want to do an artistically nice film or one high on those values. But then you also don’t want to be labelled as the television jump-over, switch-over who is just trying to do art and not addressing the gallery.
So I don’t know… but right now we are going ahead with a feature version of “Main Manto”. We are cutting a film version of it and going for a theatre release first, and the serial will become the extended version of the film.
But the ‘film-film’ that I want to do… I don’t know… now I am sort of getting a bit of clarity on that. I want to do a project that addresses the mainstream audience… and soon I hope.
____________________________________________________________________________________
More information on "Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat" can be found here.