When Saurab Shukla is on screen, your eyes are glued to him irrespective of whom he shares the screen with. He has portrayed innumerable characters with elan, starting with his debut as the flirtatious Kailash in Bandit Queen to his breakout performance as Kallu mama in Ramgopal Varma’s Satya.

Saurabh balances his work on stage and screen. The actor comes to Bengaluru with AGP World’s Barff that he wrote and directed. Barff is set in Kashmir in winter where the lives of three individuals are entangled in a web of unsettling questions. Apart from Saurabh, the 110-minute play also features Sunil Palwal and Aanchal Chauhan.

The story comes first for Saurabh. “Then you decide what the participation of a certain character within that boundary is,” says the actor over phone from Mumbai. “When I am acting, I do not construct a script. When you prepare for a character you try and understand what is being said and then bring in your own experience and thought to it.”

Using his role in Raid as an example, Saurabh says, “My role is that of an antagonist. Instead of portraying him as completely dark, he goes through a gamut of emotions as a normal person when betrayed by his family.”

Saurabh has acted in many plays, including Hayvadan, the Hindi version of Girish Karnad’s Hayvadana. “Adaptation is better than translation, because in an adaptation, you modify a story according to the milieu, and culture. Shakespeare wrote for his time, but when you do Shakespeare today, it will have value if it reinterpreted rather than just replayed.”

When he was a part of NSD repertory, Saurabh says Julius Caesar was being staged. “The play was adapted by a well-known journalist and a brilliant writer, Arvind Kumar from the Hindi Magazine Madhuri. He used Indian names, so Rome was Magadh, which interestingly also had a senate system like Rome, Caesar was Vikram and so on. When you adapt a story, it becomes as exciting as writing an original script.”

The actor, who is known for his excellent comic timing says, “Humour is not about laughing at others, but when you can laugh at yourself. When you are in pain, what you need most, is to be happy and laugh. It’s like a medicine for a situation for what one is going through.”

When one’s history is volatile, Saurabh says, humour becomes a part of the person. “You can’t keep crying all the time. You need to learn to laugh, it becomes a defence mechanism. Humour is an important part of any characterization — it does not need to be comic, but the sense of humour is definitely there.”

Ironically, some of the best comedians were the saddest people. “I do not think humour failed them. Instead I believe humour must have opened up more layers. Too much knowledge also brings sadness. It brings an awareness of what’s going on. If you are oblivious to things, then you live happily. If, however, you acquire knowledge, then, knowledge demands more understanding and a crucial part of that wanting to question and figure it out. If you practise humour in your day-to-day life, then you are a very serious person in reality.”

What was interesting about the characters Charlie Chaplin played according to Saurabh is that while the character went through the saddest possible things, he is oblivious of the pain and keeps going. “That gives you positive energy. There is a scene in a film where he eats a shoe. It’s a sad moment, but the character is so positive that he is unaware of that pain, and that gives him the courage to go through.”

A fan of Peter Sellers, Saurabh says the actor found his popular character, the French detective, Inspector Clouseau, in the Pink Panther movies a burden. “In the Life and Death of Peter Sellers, you discover how unhappy he was with the character. He made a film Being There, where he plays a gardener. It is considered one of the most beautiful films he has ever made and yet the film flopped badly. He was so heartbroken and never recovered from that.”

Fiction, says Saurabh, is a mirror image of reality. “In real life, you do not know what will happen next. If I tell you what may happen, then it becomes a fiction. Reality is more bizarre than any fiction.”

Approaching a role, Saurabh says, is a process. “I comprehend the actions of the character and make sense of why he is behaving in a particular way. That understanding comes only from your bank of knowledge, your life experiences.”

If one is playing a murderer, Saurabh says, one cannot tap into a lived experience. “Instead, you go to those moments of rage or moments when you have thought of murder but have not acted on it. For screen, you use that seed to build into an action.”

A scene from the play Barff
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Humour, Saurabh says asks for acceptance. “You are not in denial. Love, hate, anger, envy, deviousness are all natural emotions and you need to accept this truth.”

Barff, came about, Saurabh says, from something someone told him. “The situation described fascinated me and I decided to write a story. It was not a philosophical but a physical situation. Barff is structured as a thriller. It is a edge-of-the-seat drama. It took me almost six to seven years to write Barff. There are different layers in the play which were not intended at the beginning but developed in the telling. It’s an uncharted journey that leads to many other discoveries. It is a journey that changes you, an experience you go through which changes you as a person. Barff was first written as a film and then adapted for stage. I would love to make it into a film one day.”

Barff will be staged in Bengaluru on April 6 at Prestige Centre for Performing Arts, 7.30pm. Tickets on BookMyShow.