Just can't have enough of Bapu

Lillete Dubey's globetrotting play is a dispassionate look at Mahatma Gandhi - and she can't stop talking about him.

It's infectious, the enthusiasm with which Lillete Dubey talks about Gandhi. While numerous text books and Richard Attenborough have served to immortalise the man, it was through Pratap Singh's manuscript (he had researched Gandhi for 20 long years) that Dubey found some of the answers that she had been looking for in her search of the real Gandhi.

The manuscript gave birth to Sammy, a play produced by Dubey's 16-year-old Prime Time Theatre Company. The play, which has crossed 100 shows all over the world, including places like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Malaysia, is now travelling to New Zealand and Australia on a 15-day tour.

"What clicked with me was that Pratap's script was perhaps the only one which trod the middle path in explaining this phenomenon called Gandhi."

Interestingly, while Indian films have only recently begun taking interest in projecting the more human aspects of Gandhi through films like Lage Raho Munnabhai, and more recently, Gandhi My Father, Indian theatre has been experimenting with its understanding of Gandhi for a long time.

While Ramu Ramanathan's Mahadevbhai is a play based on Gandhi's letters to his long-time secretary Mahadevbhai, Chandrakant Kulkarni's Gandhi Viruddh Gandhi sought to explain the leader's strained relationship with his son Harilal.

There was Vinay Apte's controversial Mi Nathuram Godse Boltoy which looked at Gandhi from his murderer's point of view, and also Chetan Datar's Gandhi Ambedkar that examined the friction between the "father of the nation" and the "father of the constitution".

Dubey, on her part, had studied and witnessed most of these plays but found something dissatisfying at a personal level. "I felt that everyone was looking at Gandhi from their own 'point of view'. I wanted to see and read something which presented Gandhi as a person, without anyone really presenting him from their perspective."

Luckily, she found her answer in Singh's manuscript. "As much as one admires the works of all the other directors, Sammy's success, I feel, lies in the fact that it's simply a journey of a man from Mohan to Mahatma. No oddities, no look at fractured relationships, just the journey of this one man."

One of its more attractive features, according to Dubey, is the fictionalised space that Singh created between Mohan and Mahatma.

But considering the sensitivity of the subject, did she always think that Sammy would survive the acid test? "As long as I'm excited about a play, as long as it's convincing and well-written, I always think it will click," says Dubey.

She feels Sammy, like most of her other productions, has helped in awakening the senses, provoking audiences a little, getting them to think of the play long after it was over.

"In one of the places in Malaysia, where we staged the play, I found audiences sitting inside a coffee lounge and getting into a heated argument about Sammy. For me, that incident was enough to show that it had stirred audiences to quite a large extent," adds Dubey.

For someone who is steadily balancing her work in films with theatre, Dubey candidly remarks that while films have come and gone, in the last 30 years theatre has been her enduring love.

And while she understands the need of theatre artistes needing work from other mediums such as TV and films, she feels lucky to work with actors who are absolutely serious about theatre.

When she started her company in 1991 with veteran Sita Raina, she says it was for a specific reason. "I wanted to a) change people's perceptions of theatre being the third poor cousin of television and films; b) create plays that were commercially successful; and c) explore Indian writing in English, create them on stage and take them abroad. I wanted to see if we could stand up to the expectations of a global audience," she remarks.

Clearly a daunting task, especially as Indian theatre continues to struggle on several accounts, especially when it comes to funds. This is an area where Dubey considers herself lucky.

She's been a familiar face on the big screen and, by her own admission, created an audience for herself especially having played interesting roles in commercially successful films like Zubeida, Gadar, Kal Ho Na Ho and Pinjar, to name a few. And perhaps that's what has helped in her bagging sponsors like Tata,

HSBC, the Aditya Birla Group, besides banks like Yes and hospitality chains like the Taj, for a majority of her shows. "Mahesh Dattani once told me that I was lucky to get funds for my productions without compromising on the work. And on my part, I always manage to pay my actors and promise them at least 50 shows, if not more," she says.

What many people don't know is that Sammy is also staged in Hindi in many smaller towns and villages of India. "The same cast has performed Sammy for the benefit of those whose first language is not English," she says.

But doesn't it get difficult for the cast if they have to immediately perform for an English-speaking audience? She laughs and adds, "Immediately after performing in a place called Baruch in Gujarat, we flew to Brussels and performed the same play there. But that's the real fun, the challenge."

Balancing her craft between films and theatre, Dubey says, "There is no set pattern for me to choose roles in films. At my age, I really don't need to prove myself to anyone. I just don't like repeating myself and, thankfully, with the Indian film industry changing in its story-telling and scripts, it's become somewhat easier."

She will now be seen in films like My Name Is Anthony Gonzalvis, another film with Sarika and Jackie Shroff, Saurabh Shukla's I Am 24, Pankh (from White Feather Films' art house division) and Seven, apart from a cameo in a Mallika Sherawat film. She refused a pivotal role in a French movie "despite the fact that the film sounded wonderful", she says, because she felt some scenes were uncomfortable.

For now, Dubey dreams of taking Sammy to Johannesburg and working on directing her first feature film within the next two years. She is glad that films are now reinforcing the interest in Gandhi and that youngsters are increasingly filling the seats in numerous theatres.

"A youngster came up to me after watching Sammy and said, 'Thanks, the play rocks'. I suppose our interpretation of Gandhi has reached even the generation where a majority revelled in the attitude of sidelining this man as a non-entity. A comment like that makes me feel like a winner."