Unknown to unstoppable: Suarabh Shukla’s screen odyssey

Saurabh Shukla talks about his play, Barff, ahead of staging it in Bengaluru

When Saurab Shukla is on screen, your eyes are glued to him irrespective of whom he shares the screen with. He has portrayed innumerable characters with elan, starting with his debut as the flirtatious Kailash in Bandit Queen to his breakout performance as Kallu mama in Ramgopal Varma’s Satya.

Saurabh balances his work on stage and screen. The actor comes to Bengaluru with AGP World’s Barff that he wrote and directed. Barff is set in Kashmir in winter where the lives of three individuals are entangled in a web of unsettling questions. Apart from Saurabh, the 110-minute play also features Sunil Palwal and Aanchal Chauhan.

The story comes first for Saurabh. “Then you decide what the participation of a certain character within that boundary is,” says the actor over phone from Mumbai. “When I am acting, I do not construct a script. When you prepare for a character you try and understand what is being said and then bring in your own experience and thought to it.”

Using his role in Raid as an example, Saurabh says, “My role is that of an antagonist. Instead of portraying him as completely dark, he goes through a gamut of emotions as a normal person when betrayed by his family.”

Saurabh has acted in many plays, including Hayvadan, the Hindi version of Girish Karnad’s Hayvadana. “Adaptation is better than translation, because in an adaptation, you modify a story according to the milieu, and culture. Shakespeare wrote for his time, but when you do Shakespeare today, it will have value if it reinterpreted rather than just replayed.”

When he was a part of NSD repertory, Saurabh says Julius Caesar was being staged. “The play was adapted by a well-known journalist and a brilliant writer, Arvind Kumar from the Hindi Magazine Madhuri. He used Indian names, so Rome was Magadh, which interestingly also had a senate system like Rome, Caesar was Vikram and so on. When you adapt a story, it becomes as exciting as writing an original script.”

The actor, who is known for his excellent comic timing says, “Humour is not about laughing at others, but when you can laugh at yourself. When you are in pain, what you need most, is to be happy and laugh. It’s like a medicine for a situation for what one is going through.”