GREAT INDIANS

Satyadev Dubey
The enfant terrible of Indian theatre (1936-2011)

It was in 1952 that the young Satyadev Dubey first came to Mumbai from his native Bilaspur in Madhya Pradesh, to do his Bachelors in English and Hindi from St Xavier’s College. He had lost his parents at a young age and was to all intents and purposes, homeless. As things turned out, he adopted Mumbai as his home, becoming, in his own words, an honorary Maharashtrian.
He was a keen cricketer and somewhere in his young mind when he came to Mumbai was a flickering ambition to become a cricketer. Meanwhile he met Vijay Anand, Dev Anand’s younger brother by chance in his college. Anand led the college dramatic activity and coaxed Dubey to join. With plenty of time to spare, and his cricketing dream not taking off, Dubey agreed. This was his first encounter with theatre. Theatre gave him a community that he could belong to in Mumbai where he had no other roots. Gradually he realised two things—that he had an innate sense of theatre, and that theatre was a perfect outlet for all his creative energies. Partly to be with his friends and partly to give himself some formal training in theatre, he joined Ebrahim Alkazi’s drama school. Alkazi headed a group called the Theatre Unit in Mumbai. When in the early 60s he left the city for Delhi, to take over as the first director of the National School of Drama, Dubey took over the reins of Theatre Unit and turned it into the most productive theatre group anywhere in the country. In the next 50 years he did an average of two plays a year, his last being as recently as 2009.
Dubey was often described as the enfant terrible of theatre. The reasons for this were many, the chief being his bohemian lifestyle, the humiliation he heaped on actors because he believed that to be the only way to get the best out of them, and his provocative statements to the Press. There was a phase in his life when he asked to be paid for the interviews he gave because he said he was doing newspapers a favour by giving them his time! With all his waywardness, he insisted on rigorous discipline from his actors during rehearsals. The aspect of acting that he most emphasised was speech. As far as he was concerned, with an interesting script in hand, all that was needed for the play to take off was actors who spoke with an intelligent understanding of what their lines were saying and of how to use their voices to get their meaning across. In the actors training workshops which he conducted, he spent a major amount of time giving participants speech exercises which included speaking with pencils held horizontally in their mouths.
He directed plays in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and English, because no language was foreign to him. He understood the structure of every language almost instinctively. This is the reason why, despite being Hindi-speaking, he influenced Marathi theatre enormously. In the sixties and seventies, Dubey contributed to theatre in another way, not only in Mumbai but all over the country. He produced plays translated from Marathi, Kannada and Bengali and recommended them for production to his friends in Kolkata and Delhi. With this sharing of each other’s work, a pan-Indian theatre community was forged with Dubey as one of its central figures. Over the last ten years Dubey’s prodigious creativity was concentrated in writing and directing his own plays. He could no longer summon the energy required to go looking for good scripts. All his plays were autobiographical and, as such, lacked variety. But they were still excellent vehicles for new actors to gain their first experience of being on stage. It was because he always worked with young people that he stayed young till the end. Finally his neurological problem felled him. He had a massive seizure, went into a coma, did not regain consciousness for two months and finally said goodbye on December 25. He was indeed the one and only Dubey. There will never be another like him.

– Shanta Gokhale, well-known theatre critic