Up, close & personal with Shakaal

Gurnaaz Kaur

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He has won hearts with the myriad emotions he has played in his countless acts. Call him a method actor or a brilliant performer, Kubhushan Kharbanda is indeed a gift to acting.

He may be most remembered as the super villain Shakaal in Shaan but he is quite the opposite in real life. In Chandigarh to stage Atmakatha at Tagore Theatre, he was jovial, amiable and quite welcoming.

A man of few words, he started his career with theatre and says he is happy to have gotten back to it after a hiatus of two decades. “I used to do plays in Delhi but it got a break when I shifted to Mumbai. In fact, I was one of the founding members of Padatik Theatre group with director Shyamanand Jalan. Even with films, I did Sakharam Binder and Guinea Pig and they were hits. But I was so busy with films that I couldn’t spare time for plays. After 20 years, when I reached a point in my career where I could take work leisurely, we decided to do Atmakatha. We’ve been travelling with this play for five years now.”

A thought-provoking play, it has done over 50 shows and been well-received in Mumbai, Kolkata, Jaipur and Delhi. So, does performing the same show bring monotony in an artiste’s work?

“Doing a play again and again can have two effects. It can polish and enhance your performance and you can also feel worn out. Sometimes, a lot of new aspects bloom in the same play but for that you need a big team of actors. When some new actors join you, one goes back to the point of rehearsals, no matter how many shows you’ve done before. The fun of theatre is that there is a variation in performance every day. It’s not cinema that once it’s filmed there is nothing to change.”

Discussing theatre and films, when we ask this character actor to draw a comparison between the two, he says, “It wouldn’t be fair. Both are very different and equally great mediums.”

While theatre he says is an actor’s medium, films are mainly a director’s medium. “In theatre, you are free to do what you want to do and having your audience around is a great high for an actor. In films, from the time you get the script to what is finally filmed are all in the hands of a director. When the final editing happens, he decides what part to keep and what to chop.”

He has been a prominent face of art films and thinks, “The kind of films that were categorised as art cinema back then are the mainstream films these days. Some really good work is being done in the industry and the stories are worth telling.”

Kulbhushan doesn’t consider a packed theatre that has a well-known actor in a play a sign of growth. He says, “Even today, to sell a play, an actor’s name is needed. The real change will be when we’ll have houseful theatres to plays done by local artistes, when they will be able to earn a living through this medium. That will be heartening for me.”

gurnaaz@tribunemail.com