CHENNAI: Suchitra Krishnamoorthi, actor, singer and painter, credits her south Indian heritage for her love of arts. “We are all sent for dance and pattu class at such a young age, and arts is very much a part of our lives,” she explains.
Suchitra, who was born and raised in Mumbai, where she still lives, was recently in Hyderabad to stage her play Drama Queen, based on her acclaimed memoir of the same name. “I feel very connected to my heritage, and to Chennai in particular. After all, I have a relative in every street in Chennai!” she laughs.
Suchitra rose to stardom with Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1994) starring Shah Rukh Khan. After her marriage to Bollywood veteran Shekhar Kapur in 1999, she took a hiatus to spend more time with her family, taking on only sporadic acting roles.
With Drama Queen (2013), she has signalled to audiences that she is back and that she is here to stay.
Drama Queen is a candid account of her eventful life, chronicling the bumpy ride than ensues after a divorce from a celebrity. “I never thought I would write this story. I blog a lot, and a few of my posts have got some attention, being a bit controversial and tongue-in-cheek. A lady from a publishing house then reached out to me and asked if I would want to write a blog together. When I started writing, my work took on a more personal note, and the story of Drama Queen started emerging. I wrote the book in six weeks,” she recalls. After she wrote it, Suchitra became totally detached from it.
“The people in the book became characters, I became a character to myself.” In a twist of events that Suchitra never anticipated, the book was adapted into a play. Keen about doing something on theatre she says, “My producer, Ashvin Gidwani said to me, ‘you have material, you already have your own play’. Despite some initial reluctance on my part, I saw that he had a point and so we adapted Drama Queen for the stage.” The 90-minute play was a one-woman show that Suchitra says is an “exaggerated and fictionalised account of reality”, does not cover the same range of topics and time as the book.
“The book is vast; it shuttles between the past and present. In the play, we chose to confi ne it to the funny, romantic section, which is actually a very small section of the book,” she laughs.
How does it feel to see her life story on stage? Suchitra is nonchalant. “I became ever more detached after I did the play. I also don’t look back on it or ask myself how I could have done something better. If you think too much about it, it’s not natural anymore,” she explains. Suchitra seems to enjoy acting, singing, writing and painting, and doesn’t have a preference of one over another, “If you enjoy it, there’s no right or wrong way.
I’ve always been a performer. I used to act in many plays at school, and my teachers and classmates would joke, saying ‘Don’t give Suchitra a mic — she will run on stage, and you will never get it back’,” she chuckles.
Before Drama Queen, Suchitra published the Swapnalok Series of fi ctional books for young adults, about life in a housing cooperative in Mumbai. She is working on adapting The Summer of Cool, the first book in the series, into a children’s film. “I would love to adapt Drama Queen into a movie,” she says. “I’m not sure whether I would play the role or not.”
She is very clear that there would be more theatre in her life. “I took a hiatus to look after my daughter; but now that she is older, I plan to get more active. I missed theatre, which is why I came back to the stage with Drama Queen, and it certainly won’t be my last play,” she says.
Drama Queen is slated to travel around India Suchitra Krishnamoorthi and overseas in the coming months.