Setting a trend of weekend English theatre in Bombay

The year 1980. Having established my banner Burjor Patel Productions in the Gujarati theatre world, I wanted to make waves in the world of English theatre. English theatre then was a sporadic activity with the likes of Alyque Padamsee, Gerson D’cunha and Pearl Padamsee staging classic plays and musicals and Adi Marzban was busy with comedies. But there was no regular activity. I saw an opportunity to break into that scene. Fortunately for me my mentor and old friend Adi Marzban expressed a desire to join hands. We launched Adi Marzban-Burjor Patel Productions. My wife Ruby and my roly-poly friend Dinyar Contractor were from my team and Adi brought the highly talented Hosi Vasunia along with Scherazade, Rohinton Mody, Homi Daruwala and a few more to form a formidable team that took English theatre to new heights.

For our first production, I suggested to Adi a play called My Daughter Rated X. Adi said “no one would understand what ‘X’ means, so let’s call it My Darling Daughter. Those were the days when Indian minds were meant to be innocent. Not today. Every Indian urban adult today immediately registers X, XX,and XXX and no, I am not referring to garment sizes! In those days English theatre saw performances of actors who spoke ‘propah’ angrezi. Today’s audiences want ‘desi’ angrezi, so, aaj ki tareek mein, we would have called the play My ‘Bindaas’ Daughter.

The play centred on an old-fashioned chief of film censor board whose puritan ethics crack when he learns his daughter has a baby outside wedlock. Hosi Vasunia played the chief and my wife Ruby his wife.

In the final scene, Ruby, after a heated argument with her husband, gulps half a bottle of wine. It’s actually cold drink mixed with water and it requires great skill to convince the audience that one is totally drunk! One of the performances fell on our 20th wedding anniversary. That evening, my wife in her enthusiasm decided to replace stage wine with the real stuff. The performance was extra special that day but at the end of the play she was so sozzled that she could barely get up for the standing ovation.

The play was a huge success and week after week audiences flocked to the Bhulabhai Desai Auditorium, a new state-of-the-art theatre at the time, which unfortunately got converted into offices.

We could not rest on the laurels of just one play. Never Too Late that followed was about a married man in his late fifties who suddenly learns he’s becoming a father — again! This good, old-fashioned comedy on domestic affairs broke all box office records, rushing to a golden jubilee run in no time. What followed was a string of hits — Cactus Flower (the movie version had Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman; Hosi & Ruby played the roles in our stage version), a thriller called Suddenly at Home and a romantic comedy called Why Not Stay for Breakfast where Homi Daruwala and Scherazade Mody played the leads.

There was no money to be made in those days, but my dream of a truly sustainable and regular weekend theatre was born, new audiences were created and for the first time ever stage stars were household names — in English-speaking Bombay. This success spurred other theatre groups too, and theatre and Bombay truly benefitted from it. It was a win-win situation for all but I recall the words of Sebastian Vettel, four-time Formula One world champion: “You should never get used to winning. As soon as winning becomes the norm for you, you automatically start losing.”So what happened next? Wait, till we meet again!

The author is a well-known stage personality