Ep 10 : Arjun Sajnani : Bangalore Theatre Director Series

OT Radio

Arjun Sajnani reflects on his six-decade career as a prominent theatre director, actor, and filmmaker within the Bangalore arts landscape. H

Key takeaways

• Sajnani's directorial style is defined by 'cinematic' scale, utilizing elaborate costumes, lighting, and music to create immersive worlds.
• A pivotal career shift occurred when he moved from directing Western classics like Amadeus to exploring Indian mythology and history through Girish Karnad's scripts.

Main topics

• Theatre Directing
• Girish Karnad's Legacy

Notable quotes

Theatre is important and necessary.

Conclusion

A deeply personal retrospective on how a lifetime of creative discipli

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:05) Oh, well said. Yes, well said. Exactly. Speaker 2 (0:10) I don't understand you. You're all up on purchase, but it doesn't hide your assholes. You don't give a shit about gods and heroes. If you were honest, each one of you, which of you is in more at home with his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius? Or your stupid Aeneas? Or mine, mine, come to that. Or Idomeneo, king of Crete. All those anguished antiques, they're all bores. Bores, bores, bores. All serious operas written this century are boring. Speaker 2 (0:49) Four gaping mouths. What a perfect quartet. I'd love to write it. Just this second of time. This. Now. As you are. Herr Chamberlain thinking, Speaker 1 (1:01) impertinent Mozart, I must speak to the emperor at Speaker 2 (1:04) once. Herr Prefect thinking, ignorant Mozart, debasing opera with his vulgarity. Herr Court Composer thinking, German Mozart, what can he finally Speaker 1 (1:17) know about music? Speaker 2 (1:19) And Herr Mozart himself. In the middle, thinking. Speaker 2 (1:26) I'm just a good fellow. Speaker 1 (1:28) Why do they all Speaker 2 (1:29) disapprove of me? Speaker 2 (1:32) That's why opera is important, Baron. Because it's realer than any play. A dramatic poet would have to put all those thoughts down one after another just to represent this second of time. The composer can put them all down at once and still make us hear each one of them. astonishing device, a vocal quartet. I tell you, I want to write a finale lasting half an hour, a quartet becoming a quintet becoming a sextet, on and on, wider and wider, all sounds multiplying and rising together, and the together making a sound entirely new. I bet you that's how God hears the world. Speaker 2 (2:19) Millions of sound ascending all at once and mixing in his ear to become an unending music unimaginable to us. That's our job. That's our job, we composers, to combine the inner minds of him and him and him and her and her, the thoughts of chambermaids and court composers and turn this audience into God. Speaker 2 (2:45) What? I talk nonsense all day, it's incurable. Ask Stencil. Speaker 2 (2:53) My tongue is stupid. Speaker 2 (2:56) My heart isn't. Speaker 1 (3:18) And then, right away... The concert began. I heard it through the door, some serenade, and first only vaguely, too horrified to attend. But presently the sound insisted. Adigo in E-flat. Speaker 1 (3:36) It started simply enough. Just a pulse in the lowest registers. Buzzons, bassets, horns, like a rusty squeeze box. It would have become a comic, except, except for the slowness which gave it instead a sort of serenity. And then suddenly, High above it sounded like a single note it hung there unwavering piercing me through Till breath could hold it no longer and a clarinet withdrew it out of me and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight that it had me trembling. The light flickered in the room, my eyes clouded, the squeeze box groaned louder and louder over it. The higher instruments wailed and wobbled, throwing lines of sounds around me, long lines of pain around and through me. Ah, the pain. Pain as I have never known it. I called up to my sharp old God. What is this? What exactly is this? But squeeze box went on and on and the pain cut deeper into my shaking head until suddenly I was running. Dashing through the side door, stumbling downstairs into the street, into the cold night gasping for life. Speaker 2 (4:58) What? What is this? Tell me, Señor, what is this pain? What Speaker 1 (5:03) is this pain? What is this need in the sound? Forever fulfilling yet, fulfilling him who hears it utterly. Is it your need? Can it be yours? Speaker 1 (5:19) Dimly the music sounded from salon above. Dimly the star shone on the empty streets. I was suddenly frightened. It seemed to me I had heard a voice of God. Speaker 1 (5:35) That was a reading from Amadeus, the celebrated play by British playwright Peter Schaeffer. Set in the glittering musical world of the 18th century Vienna, Amadeus explores genius, jealousy, ambition, faith. And perhaps the most unsettling question of all, what happens when we encounter greatness that we cannot possess ourselves? Mozart was read by Darius Sonawalla and Salieri was read by Ranji David. The play also has a special place in the theatrical journey of Arjun Sajnani who has directed Amadeus twice, returning to Schaeffer's extraordinary world at different points in his own journey as a theatre maker. And perhaps that is what makes Amadeus such an interesting place to begin a conversation with Arjun. Because his own journey in theatre has unfolded over decades through ambition and certainty and large-scale productions and intimate moments of success and challenges, friendships and collaborations, and through a Bangalore theatre's landscape that has itself changed enormously. So, from Salieri's question about genius, envy and creation, we now turn to a man who has spent much of his life creating worlds of his own stage. What does it mean to dedicate a lifetime to theatre? What does one learn along the way? And after all these years, what keeps one returning to the stage again and again? Let's listen to Arjun Sachnani. This is OT Radio and I'm your host, Ranjit Deo. Speaker 1 (7:09) Hi and good morning Arjun. Speaker 3 (7:11) Good morning Rajiv. Speaker 1 (7:13) How are you doing today? Speaker 3 (7:15) Okay, okay. But I have many things to think about. So that's what I wake up with every day. Speaker 1 (7:21) Sure. So thank you. Firstly, thank you so much for giving us your time to be part of this. We're going to travel through your entire theatre journey. How does your career start in theatre? Speaker 3 (7:32) Yeah, I went to college in the US. Speaker 3 (7:36) That's where it started. I was always quite fascinated by the stage and what it offered. There was some, before I went to the US for after school, I had seen My sister was the director at Miranda House. She had directed Roshan Seth and his brother Haftab and Brinda Das and all these people in a play called The Reluctant Debutant, which I later did myself many, many years later. And then another landmark production that I saw was Alex, Madwoman of Shio. with Pearl Padamse and various other Hotshot Bombay Speaker 1 (8:30) actresses. And these Speaker 3 (8:31) two productions and the National School of Drama in Urdu, I had seen some stuff at the IFAC's hall. And I think it left a very strong impression on me. We didn't have a, at the Delhi Public School at that point, we did not have a... Have a drama program or any particular things that was only just elocution and that sort of thing so when I went to the US I Started my acting career with the insect play a Carol and Joseph Chippex Drama about anti-war and all that mmm. That was my first production. I was very happy that Everybody loved my accent and, you know, I got good notices. I went on further to college in Tennessee, which had a fairly strong drama department, though I was a student of English literature. And I did various things there, many, many over my four, five years, many productions. My first directorial debut came with Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. Which I did immediately after I graduated from college. And that turned out to be sort of my metier. It sort of put me on a path where I thought directing was where I was better than as an actor at that time. So that's where it started. And then it just, you know, I went to New York, moved to New York, became a waiter in a restaurant and tried to get acting work. I did a very strong production journey of life, sort of through Buddha sort of thing that the playwright Speaker 2 (10:32) had written. Speaker 3 (10:33) And that was very, very good for me. Speaker 3 (10:39) It brought me in front of New York audiences, which are the most discerning and very tough to deal with. So it was all a confidence building measure. Then I came back to India and did three, four, five productions, I think, before I moved back to the US. So that's how it started. Speaker 1 (11:02) As soon as you came back, you started Theatre Arts in Bangalore. Speaker 3 (11:06) Yes, I did start Theatre Arts in Bangalore. Speaker 3 (11:10) At that time I did plays that I had done in the United States in college that I thought were really worth doing. A great anti-war statement called Tiger the Gates. which was Jean Giraudoux's French take on the Trojan War. And I think at that point, I may have realized that I quite liked a large canvas, costumes, you know, to give something that audiences got without just relying on the words. So I started thinking of a larger canvas and production values that went a little bit beyond what... what was being seen regularly. Much like Alex's work in Delhi that I saw as a teenager. I started with Reluctant Everytime, which was a great fun comedy. We all used to work, Ashok Mandana, myself, everybody used to work at Bal Bhavan. Speaker 3 (12:20) And I did one, two, three, four productions, I think, at that