:: OP-ED

Wilde adventures

Ashok Mandanna

To drift with every passion till my soul

Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play.

Is it for this that I have given away

Mine ancient wisdom and austere control...

Oct.16 : Thus, in 1960, Micheál MacLiammóir, co-founder of the Dublin Gate Theatre, began his famous one-man tribute, The Importance of Being Oscar, to the "poet, aesthete, scholar, sage, philosopher, critic, dramatist, and wit", opening with the lines from Wilde’s poem Hélas and ending with his death in 1900. "I am not sure", Oscar Wilde mused in his last days, "the world will forgive me if I should survive into the next century".

For the next 15 years MacLiammóir travelled the world to thunderous and universal appreciation of Oscar Wilde’s and his own genius, ensuring, if all else is forgotten, that Wilde’s name remains as fresh today in the 21st century as it did in the 1890s. Micheál MacLiammóir died in 1978, unaware that his play had just received a fresh lease of life... in India.

The year was 1976. Barely had the applause died on MacLiammóir’s world tour when a cocky, fresh-faced young man, based in Bangalore and straight out of the National School of Drama (NSD), stood on the Shri Ram Centre stage in Delhi and tried to emulate his feat as part of a nationwide tour.

I was that fresh-faced young man and (looking back) must have had a huge respect for my own abilities as an actor to have ventured on stage alone. Wilde may even have approved. "I have no wish", he declared, convinced early in life of his own genius, "to pose as being ordinary, great heaven!"

Ebrahim Alkazi, still the director of NSD at the time, was among the audience that night. I began with Hélas and ended with Wilde’s last days in a Paris hotel two hours later. (Wilde’s room at the hotel in question was reputed to have wallpaper "of three shades or tints: magenta and magenta and magenta". With each passing day Wilde’s desperation at observing the wallpaper grew till he finally cried out, "Yes, of course, one of us has to go!")

Alkazi came backstage after the performance to say "good show" and pointed out a couple of moves I could have done better. He then asked in dulcet tones, "Where did you get the script?" I confessed that I had "borrowed" the book from the NSD library the previous year and hadn’t bothered to return it. He didn’t bat an eyelid before replying gently, "At least you did something with it". Of all the accolades I received through the 70s and 80s (the run of the play), that qualifies to be the best.

What Alkazi didn’t know (and only a few people in the world knew at the time) was that I was also, at that precise moment, an "unofficial" courier for the underground movement headed by George Fernandes against the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi.

Let me set the scene. Indira Gandhi’s election in Uttar Pradesh was struck down by the Allahabad high court, whereupon she declared Emergency, herded (almost politely) all the Opposition members into jail (including a friend of mine, Snehalata Reddy, who had co-founded the Abhinaya Drama Group in Bangalore with me — for her association with the labour union leader George Fernandes), and then proceeded to run the country with the sort of discipline not seen since the British Raj.

One of the few people to escape the dragnet was George Fernandes, who promptly went underground.

The Emergency lasted from mid-1975 to early 1977, exactly coinciding with my departure from NSD to make my independent foray as a one-man performer — only to fall into the clutches of a band of freewheeling revolutionaries! Let me be frank; I did it willingly. My friend and mentor was in jail, after all.

My cover was perfect; I was only performing a "bloody play" and who the heck cared if it was about an Irishman who had been in prison himself...

The year was still 1976...

I was again in Delhi staying with a friend of mine in Defence Colony (preparing for a performance of the play at the India International Centre, IIC) when I received a mysterious phone call. "Wait outside the gate" at "precisely such-and-such time" with "your package". "An Ambassador car will pick you up".

I’m not saying I don’t like playing silly buggers or imitating the heroics of Che Guevara but this was a day before my performance. If this "Ambassador car" should transport me to Himachal or Gujarat for a clandestine meeting... it was a long way back to satisfy my audience (including that very kind gentleman, Roshan Seth — he can correct me if I’m wrong — who had cut through the red-tape at the IIC to get me their stage to perform on).

The car drove me only as far as another house in Delhi. I handed over my package of leaflets before I was escorted to a room at the back of the premises, which housed, among other things... George Fernandes.

"George", as I like to call him, had grown a beard since being declared persona non-grata by Mrs Gandhi. I was tempted to say, "Dr Livingstone, I presume". He was stunned to discover I was in Delhi to do a "play", a far cry from what he expected of his regular cadres.

The next time I met "George", he was industries minister in the Central government.

The year was still 1976... I was in Bombay to perform the play for IPTA at an open-air school stage in Bandra when — but that, as they say, is another story, one that features the Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi and the filmmaker M.S. Sathyu (The editor said, "Keep it to a thousand words, PLEASE!")

But strange that I was not told

That the brain can hold

In a tiny ivory cell

God’s heaven and hell

As with Oscar Wilde, there is a tragic finale. It was now 1977 and the Emergency was lifted. I was travelling by bus from Bombay to Bangalore (as tedious a journey then as it is now) and when we stopped at Tumkur, a town barely an hour out of Bangalore, I picked up the morning paper. A headline read: Actress Dead. Snehalata Reddy, soon after her release from prison, had succumbed to a heart attack. To borrow a line from MacLiammóir, I was too late even to say goodbye.

Oscar Wilde, an Irish playwright, poet and author known for his

biting wit, was born on October 16, 1854. His works include The

Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Ashok Mandanna is an actor and theatre personality. He studied at the National School of Drama and London’s Weber

Douglas Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.