Suchitra Krishnamurthi's act encapsulates bittersweet period of her life

Suchitra Krishnamurthi's solo theatre act encapsulates a bittersweet period of her life

She walked into showbiz in the visage of a teenaged actor, trained in classical music and went on to become a pop singer. Her knack for music made her a composer and the rest of the fame was acquired by her ceaseless writing. And then, she became a painter and a candlestick-making entrepreneur. 

Yet, for the protean Suchitra Krishnamoorthi, the hardest thing to do, so far, was standing on a stage in front of her parents and her daughter and enact her own life story. The drama, as real as it gets, is sparking a new facet of her versatility.

A single mother at 41, Krishnamoorthi has encapsulated much of her life in her book, a fictionalised memoir first published in 2013. The title, Drama Queen, is the significance of her personality that continues to find meaning in all her shenanigans. In its second life, the book has been adapted into an eponymous theatre production.

She holds the stage as the only actor appearing as her candid self. The play is further spiced by a string of characters that never appear on stage. The names are real, people from Krishnamoorthi’s personal life, and so are the conversations. But are they really there or are they just a bunch of voices in her head? The play draws a thin line between reality and fiction that is left for the audience to interpret.

By the virtue of the play’s concept, Krishnamoorthi, who has taken quite a few and long hiatuses in her acting career to pursue her other passions, has taken up a daunting task to perform in front of live audiences. It sure wasn’t easy. Her voraciousness had to battle it out with her stage fight, she explains.

“It makes me extremely anxious each time and the reason I chose to come back to theatre was to get rid of this nervousness,” says Krishnamoorthi. “When you return to a workplace after a long time, you get complacent and lose your confidence.” She has the screenplay, the dialogues as well as the music to her credit.

Produced by Ashwin Gidwani of AGP World and directed by Innayat Ali Sami, Krishnamoorthi briefly enacts a few years that she refers to as a hormone-driven period of her life. The overtones of her sexual life, or the depravation of it, are unmissable. Unsurprisingly, therefore, she speaks of her ex-husband, the internationally acclaimed filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, quite a few times. But he hasn’t watched the play, she says.

Their 16-year-old daughter Kaveri, however, has much hand in inspiring the play and completes its final act. “My daughter told me to stop using her as an excuse and get back to acting,” says Krishnamoorthi. The teenager is a budding singer-songwriter and is the voice behind the finale song of the play.

Why theatre and not a feature film? Krishnamoorthi says she was very active in theatre societies as a child and wanted to return to it. She also does not rule out the possibility of her tell-all book being made into a script. 

Despite being last seen on the big screen in Ram Gopal Varma’s Rann in 2010, Krishanmoorthi says she is always on the lookout for interesting opportunities and has been following her passions. She has recently completed a web series and says that a few projects are near completion. Her last few performances have not met success at the box office, but Krishnamoorthi says she has much to cherish from her theatre comeback.
 

“My mother’s laughter was the loudest in the hall on the opening night. My daughter loved it too,” she says, “and hugged me after the performance and said that she was very proud me.”

This is what, Krishnamoorthi says, matters the most to her.