Eyes on the tiger

Jaimini Pathak knows how to spread the green message to children. Deepa Gahlot has more

Before the performance of his children’s play Once Upon a Tiger, Jaimini Pathak announces that the kids can make as much noise as they want. They can even make bird and animal sounds, since the play is set in a jungle.

So, at the end, when one of  the characters says, “Hands up!” a child in the audience pipes up with “Pants down!” Which, according to the producer-director-writer, is fine. “My announcement completely alters their concept of seeing a play. They know that they don’t have to sit with fingers on their lips and behave themselves.”

Early in his stage career, Pathak acted in Ramanathan’s children’s play The Boy who Stopped Smiling and then, years later, wrote his own Once Upon a Tiger, which, despite being a ‘message’ about wildlife conservation, is a big hit with kids.

“Because it isn’t a lecture,” he says, “some of the lines were converted into a song, and I had a mother ask for the lyrics because her child was driving her nuts humming the first line: Will you, won’t you save the tiger. The fun should not go out of children’s theatre, we should not enforce some idea of what theatre should be like on them, that amounts to looking down on kids.”

Pathak’s longest running play (125 shows) is Mahadevbhai, a one-man play (also by Ramanathan), a slice of history from the point of view of Mahatma Gandhi’s secretary Mahadevbhai Desai. “It could be considered a children’s play, since I performed in schools and colleges all over the country. And they reacted well. There is a cynicism about Gandhi, but today’s kids are well informed.”

Pathak and his wife Suruchi Aulakh (also an actor, with whom he did 3, Sakina Manzil) started their group Working Title in 1999 (“Almost ten years ago — how time flies!”) and initially did original plays by Ramanathan. “But,” Pathak says, “it is a challenge to come up with something new.”

So he did Chekhov’s The Seagull, a big production with 11 actors, which could not run for too long, “because actors in such a play are hard to replace”. He also did a funky, energetic production of German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Arabian Night, which did not quite work. Pathak’s last play, a musical Tukra’s Dream based on a Chandrashekhar Kambar original, opened last year; he shut that down too, “because if 90 per cent of one’s energy goes into logistics, it isn’t worth it”.

So what would attract him to a play? “Any play, old or new, has to say something beyond the lines, beyond what is on stage. Then it’s worth doing. Experiments should not be conducted at the cost of the audience.” Like every theatre person, doing Shakespeare is a dream, which may have to wait. Meanwhile a new production is being planned for October.

Getting actors for his productions isn’t a problem, Pathak says. “There is a loose network of 50-70 actors with whom I have worked over the years, and I just call up and ask them to say yes or no. In my group, there is no star system; everybody gets paid the same amount.”

He was seen in Subhash Ghai’s Black and White, but there are no other Bollywood films on the way soon.  “Acting is the most carefree and paying job,” Pathak sighs; after all, he is also producer-director-writer...