STEEPING DEEP IN STAGE

Theatre artiste R Natana Sabapathy's life of acting is about learning the characters and perfectly emulating even the slightest details on stage

- K V VASUDEVAN

While speaking about the tag of the king of Tamil theatre, R Natana Sabapathy brushed aside the fact of himself having donned the characters of a king. But then, a closer look at his performance and the inputs of his drama colleagues revealed that he was indeed the master blaster. For the record, Sabapathy has over 300 plays spread over 2,500 shows to speak volumes of his magnetic stage presence. A long-time friend and veteran scriptwriter KP Arivanandam suggested that Sabapathy's USP was slipping into any character and making capital use of the stage space in every sense of the word.

Donning characters much below his age, the septuagenarian said the one character that has stood the test of time has to be Aditya Karikalan in the evergreen Ponninyin Selvan for Ajay Entertainers. Dwelling on that historical character, Sabapathy says he went into deep research to get the nuance of the character right. Sabapathy says, "History has it that Karikalan's killing was an act of revenge on the Chola Prince by the Pandyas but critics had raised doubts of the involvement of Nandini, who longed to exact revenge on the act of Karikalan beheading her beloved Veerapandiya. The homework helped me to get deep into the character. Once the script is understood, it is up to the artiste concerned to make the most of the inputs. In history scripts, the facts have to be in place for the audience to connect with the happenings."