Returning from dinner in Kozhikode, I received a text message on my phone. It consisted of four words. Words that shocked and stopped me. A call to the number confirmed the tragic news. A personal loss, a loss to the theatre fraternity, to all playgoers.
Not many people have names that define their lives. But she brought good fortune to the world of English theatre especially in Chennai, and also had the good fortune of being able to die on stage performing. She entered, spoke a couple of lines, keeled over and died. As her co-actor and friend of many years, P C Ramakrishna, puts it: “It’s an actor’s dream!”
But Bhagyam, or Bhagirathi Narayanan, wasn’t just an actor. She was a core of enthusiasm in the world of theatre. Her creativity made you gasp. And yet she was ingenuous enough to express her own inner uncertainties. After a remarkable showing of Girish Karnad’s ‘Naga Mandala,’ which she directed with refreshing originality, I expressed my stunned appreciation. She laughed and looked embarrassed and said, “Thanks, but you’re too kind”!
At the cast party of my ‘Platform,’ I told her that hers was the only part that I’d written with the actor in mind. “No one else could have done it like this!” And again, she smiled and looked away. “You’re always saying that”!
Bhagyam was self-effacing. She loved music concerts, but invariably sat in the back rows, unnoticed and enjoying herself. When they looked for photographs for a newspaper tribute after her passing, they could find very little. She didn’t believe in posing. Her friends recall the time she was too shy to take a bow: “In the early days, she even refused to appear during curtain calls. We finally had to pull her out”!
She sailed past accolades; and that was perhaps the only way she could move from pinnacle to pinnacle. When people came to me after ‘Platform,’ invariably every comment was followed by the phrase, “And, of course... Bhagyam!” She played to perfection the three different roles in the play... a rough mother-in-law, a wily prostitute and a mild enough wife and mother.
She also did a remarkable role in my earlier play, ‘Bow Of Rama.’ It was a complex characterisation, and I realised the casting difficulty only when it was on the verge of rehearsals. But Bhagyam, as usual, went beyond my doubts and made the character live. She played the wife of a crafty local politician who lashed at him with an acid tongue, but subsided dumbstruck whenever he slyly used his ultimate weapon, that of their childlessness. I have rarely seen an actor who could bring so much to a stage experience, and transform moods so easily. Watching Bhagyam direct was also great education.
Besides being a theatre person, she was also a path-breaking lawyer and social activist. That night, April 15, the four-word phone message read: “Bhagyam is no more.” But that’s not something you can easily say of a creative giant like Bhagirathi Narayanan.
The author can be contacted at
varma@shreevarma.com.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
