Shernaz Patel Recounts the Story of a Passionate Career

A Childhood Inside Theatres

Shernaz Patel grew up inside the stir of auditoriums, imbibing the rhythms and murmurs of a workplace fitted out with lights and satiny curtains. Her parents, Ruby and Burjor Patel, were passionate theatre professionals. Their three children were raised amidst the swirl of costume changes and audience ovations, with the couple shuttling from green rooms to school pick-ups inside the hurly-burly of 1970s Mumbai.

“Conversations were creative and around the theatre in some form or the other,” Patel recalls, in an enthralling Zoom conversation. Her siblings and she often played hide-and-seek inside huge halls, darting deftly behind props or empty chairs, even as her parents readied themselves for a show. The children were also accorded ancillary chores, assisting with backstage tasks or selling program booklets to attendees.

A very young Patel had observed the manner in which her mother, a reputed actress in the Gujarati and English theatre circles, won the rousing cheers and applause of smitten audiences. Even as a child, she already felt proud of who her parents were: “They were happy, colorful and eccentric people.”

From School Plays to National Television

Viewers who have watched Shernaz straddle the stage with enviable elan might be surprised that she was “a very shy child.” Besides her eclectic upbringing inside such electrifying venues, she thinks her coyness might have naturally propelled her towards some form of self-expression. Since theatre was already woven into her DNA from birth, acting seemed like an instinctual next step. Even at school, she was drawn to performing in inter-house plays and at elocution contests.

Such association with drama continued into her college years at Elphinstone, where she completed her Bachelor’s in Psychology and Sociology. While most peers stacked credentials for conventional careers, Patel was often inside the Drama Societies, performing at collegiate festivals. She does recall being tugged in by her German classes during that period. Indicative perhaps of her natural leaning towards the play of words and inflections, she maxed her German papers as effortlessly as she took to the stage.

Soon after, she signed up to act in Khandaan, one of the nation’s iconic television series, that depicted the rollercoaster tribulations of an upper-income Indian family. Patel played a nurse who needed to win the family’s affections. In an interview with the Hindustan Times, she recalls the manner in which she started getting recognized everywhere: “My character was pregnant and I remember taking the bus, and strangers started congratulating me for my on-screen pregnancy! We were mobbed everywhere. On Wednesday night, in my building, if you went down the lift all you could hear is the Khandaan theme song.” (Hindustan Times, Oct 2019)

Growing With the Unforgettable Love Letters

Though Khandaan made Patel a recognizable face to millions, her most cherished performance is the widely-watched and much lauded Love Letters. Written by A.R. Gurney, the play depicts a kindergarten-to-grave relationship between two actors – the stuffier and more serious Andy Ladd, and the irrepressible, playful and occasionally self-destructive Melissa Gardner. Moving across their rather divergent life trajectories  – he a lawyer and then politician, she an artist – whose lows and highs are captured in letters, the play possesses an uncanny universality.

While its protagonists are typical of well-off WASPs, the on-off relationship communicated as evocatively through its silences as through its words, can enthrall audiences across the globe. In particular, Patel and Rajit Kapur, in a production directed by Rahul daCunha, have evoked the links and rifts with memorable fizz and sizzle.

That production stands out to Patel, among innumerable others, for many reasons. For one thing, she and Kapur, like the couple they perform, have grown older over the shows. When they first performed the play, they were both young, and hence had to imagine themselves into the “older” parts. Now, they have to recall their own youth, while acting out the “younger” versions.

Patel also admits that one’s own life introduces experiences and emotions, that inject familiarity into parts that may have felt uncharted earlier. “The more you live, the more you are able to color your character; you understand the suffering that a person goes through much more at a later date. Whereas when you’re young, you’re just imagining what that must be like. We’ve really been blessed to have this play in our lives,” she says.

Approaches to Acting

Patel says her approach to acting might have evolved over the years. In general, she believes in the sanctity of the “text,” and in according respect to the playwright’s words. She even plays close attention to punctuation marks, taking care to invoke each comma, or full stop in her speech. The process of unraveling the text, to discover the writer’s intent, is often an intense one, and can involve weeks of readings and rehearsals, before she’s satisfied with her own performance.

“It’s a discipline and it’s a craft that requires a lot of rigor, which entails making a lot of mistakes. You try and try and try and try something till it just clicks.” Of course, with each play, she has to restart the process. But perhaps, the reward lies in that kind of ardour. As Patel puts it, “That’s the beauty of this profession, you always start again.”

Embarking on a Midlife Master’s in Drama

Even as her career hoisted her into an elite circle of the nation’s highly-acclaimed acting talents, Patel always felt like she wanted to study further. She was keen on educating herself abroad, but the fees were too high. Then she won a Charles Wallace Scholarship at the age of 38, for a Master’s at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (currently known as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland).

Though she was armed already with a significant body of work, Patel felt like she really gained from her Glasgow stint, where she was able to add new perspectives to her practitioner skills.

After a year at the Academy, Patel said she had sharpened her own approach to acting. She learned to use space in new ways, with an enhanced consciousness of physicality and movement. She also cultivated a deeper sensitivity towards her voice, and how to “use it better than I did before.”

Cultivating a Performer’s Resilience

Patel recalls an instance, as a child, when she watched her mother accidently cut herself with a glass bottle on stage. Though Ruby Patel was bleeding, she picked up a duster or some other fabric that was lying about, and wordlessly tied up her bleeding hand. Without further ado, she finished the play. Soon after the end, she had to be rushed to a medic. Shernaz was to always remember her mother’s steeliness.

In her own career, Patel has withstood equally harsh tests. Once, she was acting in a play by Bharat Dabholkar titled It’s All Yours Janab. Shernaz and another actor, Harish Patel, were on the stage when they heard rumbles backstage. Dabholkar briefly put his head through an aperture and requested for any doctors, who might be present in the audience, to rush backstage. But otherwise, he signaled for Shernaz and Harish to just “carry on.” And Patel recalls that the play was a comedy, so they had to keep up with their comic expressions and light-hearted banter, even as an unknown medical emergency was unfolding a few feet away from them. They were to learn later, that an elderly actor had suffered a heart attack.

Patel has also witnessed occasions when actors lose a parent or a spouse, but since they have committed to a performance, they usually turn up to play their part. After all, most plays cannot plan for substitutes or understudies. As Patel puts it, the expectation on such occasions is that “you show up. You’ve got fever, you’re not well, you show up.”

When Patel herself was performing in a play called “Iron”, she was running a high temperature for a few days before the show. On the D-day, she broke into a ghastly rash, and when she sent her doctor a picture of the eruption, he sensed it was Chikungunya. But it was the opening night, and two 2.5 hour house full shows had been scheduled.

Fortunately, the character she was playing was a prisoner, so she felt a rough-edged look imparted by the rash was in keeping with the role. Despite contending with her fever and skin condition, Patel ploughed through the show, summoning reserves of energy to get through the performance. She was feeling depleted inside, but the audience would have never known that.

Fostering New Writer Voices

Patel’s contribution to the nation’s cultural realm extends well beyond her films and stage performances. Through their company, Rage Productions, Patel, Kapur and daCunha also launched the very creative Writer’s Bloc Program to both identify and develop new playwrights. She tied up with The Royal Court theatre in the UK, which trained selected writers. The intention was to discover new, diverse and authentic Indian stories without trying to service reigning trends or imagined audience preferences.

Later, when Patel and her team performed the plays at a buzzy festival, the playwrights were galvanized to see their own works on stage. Many of the writers discovered and cultivated through the program went on to successful writing careers thereafter – some as playwrights, others as screenwriters or novelists.

Besides the Writer’s Bloc Program and Festival, Patel encouraged much younger aspirants with a program titled “Class Act.” Her company, in partnership with The Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, conducted a workshop for school children on how to write for the theatre, after which professional actors performed stage readings of the 10-minute scripts written by the very young “playwrights.” Since parents, families and regular audiences were invited to watch the budding writers, the little playwrights were thrilled to have penned those productions. Patel notes that kids are more likely to observe a world shorn of pretentious or self-conscious adult filters, so they often possess a natural knack for dialogue.

One of Patel’s objectives with such programs is to make writing – whether for the screen or theatre – feel like a viable and exciting career. As a performer, she is aware that certain professions like acting attract too many aspirants, whereas the less visible but equally vital writerly roles draw too few.

Finding Magic in Mishaps

Stories abound in Patel’s vivid life too. Besides theatre, Patel has also acted in many epochal films, including Black, Talaash, Guzaarish and many more. But one of her most memorable performances was on stage at Prithvi.

It was a Love Letters show when the lights suddenly blinked off after Act One. Power supplies had snapped in the whole area and the audience and actors were left fretting in the dark. Patel and Kapur waited with the others, hoping that the electricity would return in 10 or 15 minutes. But after 20 minutes, they decided that they had tested the audience’s patience. So they apologetically offered to refund the ticket money.

But the viewers were unwilling to leave the place, with the play tantalizingly half-finished. A chorus of voices begged them to continue, even without lights: “Can you do it? Because we don’t want to go home.”

The crew then placed candles along the edges of the stage. In the dimness, and on a candle-lit stage, Patel and Kapur pulled off the second act. There was no music, just the actor silhouettes speaking and moving about the stage. As it turned out, it was an unforgettable and mesmerizing experience for all – for the actors and the audience.

In his Introduction to Love Letters, the playwright A.R. Gurney says that his character Andy imposes order in his world through writing. The free-spirited Melissa couldn’t care about controlling her world, embodying a liberation that Andy yearns for after her death. For Patel perhaps, the stage has been a means to make sense of the world, and also to chart out a passionate life, on her own terms, as few have the courage to.

References

Gurney, A.R., Love Letters, Plume Book (Penguin), New York, 1989