Naseeruddin Shah adapts George Bernard Shaw’s works

Theatre director Naseeruddin Shah is attempting to alter the aphorism that Shakespeare is the be-all and end-all of stage talk. And he’ll tell you that himself. His latest production By George! will bring to stage one of the most renowned playwrights of all times, George Bernard Shaw.

Says Shah, “I had studied Shaw in college, but I wasn’t aware of his stature as a playwright. Like most, I used to think that Shakespeare was the only playwright to be looked up to, until I discovered Shaw’s writings.” Naseer’s new Motley production is a collection of three short pieces by Shaw — with Village Wooing, a ‘comediettina’ as the centre piece, preceded by the one-act play How He Lied to Her Husband and a poem, English pronunciation, which deals with the peculiarities of spoken English.

Interestingly, Shah also ponders on the concerns of spoken English and admittedly so. “English, be it American or British, need to be spoken with that accent. Great writing is not difficult to enact. Having said that, it’s not easy either. You have to engage with it and only then it reveals itself to you. You have to speak the words with clarity. With SMS lingo coming into the picture, people have forgotten to speak the language correctly. The first of Shaw’s piece in fact makes fun of the way words are spelt now,” he says.

The theatre veteran would have loved to bring Shaw’s Pygmalion to the stage if it weren’t such a huge production. “I also want to stage Tom Stoppard’s plays and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and All My Sons,” says Shah, who has dedicated the entire year to theatre.