League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Teekam Joshi

Actor Teekam Joshi on playing a villain, a writer, a commitment phobe and a gay lover, all in one week

When the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards are announced on March 27 at a carefully crafted ceremony attended by the cream of theatre, one nominee will be missing from the audience. Teekam Joshi, shortlisted for his turn as a gay man whose cool dude attitude hides a deep conflict about homosexuality in A Straight Proposal, will be performing in a new play at Shri Ram Centre on that day. “It’s called Miss Paul, written by Mohan Rakesh, and I am playing a writer whose closest friend is an overweight woman. He is calm and composed, she is falling apart,” says Joshi.

In person, he is tall but not as assured as on stage. Even his distinguishing feature, the two beauty spots on either side of his chin, are easy to miss. He speaks carefully, even cautiously, aware of his sentences. “I am shy. Maybe I don’t want to face myself. Drama school teachers always say that we should look at the mirror and practise our lines but I have never been able to do that. I try not to look at the mirror even after make-up,” he says.

It is safe to presume that Joshi has been avoiding mirrors all through this week. Maybe This Summer, staged in Orissa on March 24, had him play the role of an urban young man in a live-in relationship who is in a dilemma about marriage. While preparing for Miss Paul, Joshi was also playing Shamsher in Zangoora, a fantasy drama in Delhi’s Kingdom of Dreams. “Shamsher has all the negative qualities of a villain, he is an aiyash and plays around with girls.

I wear harem pants, carry a big sword and wear a big beard for this role. My role as Shamsher balances the seriousness of the writer in Miss Paul and the dilemma of the young man in Maybe This Summer,” says Joshi. Then, there is A Straight Proposal for the META audience and jury on March 26.

Director and playwright of A Straight Proposal Happy Ranajit had been Joshi’s junior at the National School of Drama (NSD) and the actor “knew about this play even as it was being written”. The play is about a teacher played by Dilip Shankar and the men in his life, among them Joshi’s Dhruv. Playing gay was a “big challenge because we have to change a lot of chemistry in ourselves” but it wasn’t the first time Joshi has taken on the role of an alternate gender. While a part of the NSD Repertory after graduating from NSD, Joshi had played a eunuch under director Waman Kendre in 2003. “We had to be in a sari on the NSD campus all the time and we continuously had to follow the mannerisms of a eunuch,” he says. He carried those mannerisms home and, for weeks after the play, his friends would point out that he was behaving like a eunuch. Another of Joshi’s plays, Putrid Prologue, is about a netwa, a young boy who plays girls’ roles in the dance theatre of Bihar, becoming a gigolo in Mumbai. “There was no hesitation when A Straight Proposal happened, though we took a conscious decision to not play a gay man with feminine mannerisms. Even in the love-making scene, we are two men who are in a relationship,” he says.

Joshi has been in theatre since he was seven. In Bhopal, where his father worked for the culture department, their neighbourhood, Professors’ Colony, was home to writers, musicians, artists and theatre directors, among them Bansi Kaul. “I was a part of the brat pack as a child and everybody was quite fed up with us. People started saying, ‘do something about these children’ and Bansi Kaul did something — children’s theatre workshops,” says Joshi. In the years that followed, Joshi’s friends opted out of Kaul’s workshops but he stuck on and was trained by the most formidable names in theatre, from Kaul to Habib Tanvir. He became adept at exercises in clowning and Chhau among others.

NSD, which he joined in 1998, seemed a natural trajectory. “In Bhopal, I used to think that something must change in us if we are to play a character; at NSD, I learnt that what changes is our thinking,” he says, recalling days spent perfecting the art of shifting pressure points in his body and training his muscles among others.

Joshi says that today, his spine responds quickly when he takes on a character. “I never adopt mannerisms, I think about a character and I understand it from the spine. The attitude comes naturally and my breathing pattern changes accordingly. I don’t need to try, now I have the process in my body,” he says, “Breathing exercises also enable me to exit a character far more easily than I could earlier. A game of table tennis, a round of Discovery Channel and the joys of India TV help me get back to being myself.”

A Straight Proposal will be staged at Kamani Auditorium on March 26 at 8 pm. Tickets: Rs 100 and Rs 200 available at ww.bookmyshow.com.
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Source:: Indian Express