From Madras Café to The Kashmir Files to web series Mumbai Diaries 26/11 to the latest Aussie project The Jungle and the Sea (to name a few), Prakash Belawadi has made his mark in more ways than one
Prakash Belawadi is in Sydney these days busy prepping for The Jungle and the Sea, a play “that gathers an extraordinary group of South Asian actors, performers and musicians from Sydney, Sri Lanka, India and New Zealand”. It will be staged from 12 November to 18 December at Belvoir St Theatre.
It is perhaps easiest to describe The Jungle and the Sea as a kind of a continuous of the previous hit play Counting and Cracking by the same playwright S. Shakthidharan—of which Belawadi was a part too. But the actor says unlike the first, which follows the journey of one Sri Lankan-Australian family over four generations, from 1956 to 2004, The Jungle and the Sea is an epic play where the construction of characters, staging, interpretation of dialogue, et al, are not the same.
The producers describe The Jungle and the Sea as “a rich, sweeping new play that combines two great pillars of literature—the Mahābhāratha and Antigone—with the untold histories of the Sri Lankan civil war to forge a new story about surviving loss, discovering love and building a path to justice”.
Over phone from Sydney, the unassuming seasoned actor tells The Indian Sun, “You have to watch it. I don’t want to reveal too much… I don’t have a single specific character in this. I have three big characters.”
Interestingly, Counting and Cracking, for which Belawadi received Australia’s prestigious Helpmann Award (2019) for Best Actor, hit the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and in Birmingham this year after a sell-out at the Sydney and Adelaide festivals in 2019. Judging by this, The Jungle and the Sea is much awaited.
Given his illustrious career, no doubt Belawadi has our attention. When asked what attracted him to Shakthidharan’s plays, he says it is the creative satisfaction that theatre brings. “It is artistic, you see how from your cultural, social, national perspectives you find common ground in a creative process. It is very exciting.”
By his own telling, Belawadi was not really an actor to begin with. “I spent 40 years backstage before I started acting – doing lighting and later directing. I am really known as a director, also bit of a writer because I write big novels into plays, I have written couple of my own plays but mainly I do big adaptations from novels.” The serial Garva, which he wrote and directed in 2001 is still considered a classic among Kannada serials.
For Belawadi, it is an extremely rare privilege to sit with a play (Jungle and the Sea) that is original, where the writers themselves are directing it. ”In everyday rehearsals, we are allowed to participate in the discussion. We reinterpret the meaning of the text sometimes, we reinterpret the characters sometimes, we form an understanding of the historical context when these events happened and how we should see it.
“So there are discussions that are political, social, cultural, and sometimes, religious. And it is such a privilege to be in that kind of a 360 degrees creative process where, as an actor, I am part of stage design idea, one that evolves with the actors’ participation. I feel intoxicated.”
Rooted in theatre, Belawadi admits to auditioning once in 2012 for Madras Café, a Bollywood film that he believes made him really famous. “I had done a few Kannada art films prior, was even nominated as a best actor in Girish Karnad’s film Kanooru Heggadithi (1999) but nobody would see me as an actor,” he says with a laugh.
But Madras Café just turned it around for him. Since then, Belawadi has acted in many other Bollywood projects such as Airlift (2016), Wazir (2015), Talvar (2015), The Kashmir Files (2022), noted web series Mumbai Diaries 26/11 (2021), to name a few. Belawadi, who works mostly in the Hindi and Kannada film industry says, “I have acted in maybe 80 films and seven web series.”
Belawadi is a very busy actor. He is writing a play on Dr B R Ambedkar, based on someone else’s work. He has signed four movies scheduled for January 2023. “I have about eight films in the reckoning even before I have gone to India.”
He recognises there is money in there, which is important. “The Australian work cannot match what Bollywood pays because cinema is big in India,” he candidly admits.
Which is why doing plays means giving up a lot for Belawadi. The urge is to just go back to writing and doing theatre. “But my wife says I should not do that, my children say I have done some 40 years of theatre,” he says with a laugh.
Despite having both his feet planted in films and theatre now, clearly it is the latter his soul is in. Telling a big story is possible today only in the theatre because in the other medium everything is so expensive, he reflects.
“There is something great about theatre because it frees you from the burden of having to please the audience, you can challenge them with the story you are telling. And whether they like it or not, they will engage with it with free minds.
“The last thing why I will say theatre is sacred is because we are free from the burden of verisimilitude. If I set a story in Australia and do a web series or film, I have to shoot it in Australia or some place that resembles Australia. But on stage I can refer to a corner and say this is Australia and people believe. When you are free from verisimilitude, the performance becomes easy. Theatre frees you from this problem of verisimilitude.”
A long and varied career, one cannot help but marvel at Belawadi’s outstanding performances in all the mediums.
Walking in the streets of Sydney, he is an easily recognisable face. He says he ended up in a dinner discussion with some 40 odd people recently. “I get pampered a lot because of the movies. The privileges of being an actor.”
Asked what scripts he is drawn to, Belawadi says, “I tend to pick stories of near history because India has a troubled idea about history. There is a set of people who are called right wing, who question the way history is being taught because of the colonial and post-colonial years… And there is another kind of history which claims quite stupidly that India was invented by the British. So somewhere in between we need a reckoning. There is this great upsurge of interest in near history events – things that have happened in our living memory. That is very interesting and those are the films I tend to pick.”
Success may be a matter of hard work or good luck, but Belawadi shows he has a perspective to it.
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From 'Madras Café' to 'Kashmir Files' to the web series 'Mumbai Diaries 26/11' (just to name a few), Prakash Belawadi has made his mark in more ways than. #TheIndianSun @BelawadiBlr @indira_laisram https://t.co/p50DRphCYg
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