When he was six years old, he played a maid servant in a spoof on Cinderella at Baldwins. At 17, he became a young prince in Girish Karnad’s Hindi play, Rakta Kalyan. A year later, he was a hitman in The Dark Side of Comedy, which also happened to be his debut theatre production under the banner Image that he founded. Since then, Saad Khan (20), a student of mechanical engineering at MS Ramaiah, has done much more.
He competed at mad ads and mono acting at inter-collegiate fests, won accolade (and acrimony, when were the two ever divorced?). “At Baldwins, I was a topper; was very shy, won many elocution competitions … but people never recognised that I could act,” says Khan. “It was at Joseph’s arts and science college that my life changed. In a class of 125, I was made the class rep in first PU. I was also made the secretary of the literary club, and that’s where I got into college plays and mad ads.”
Soon after stage managing for the play, Howdah (Is it so?) in 2000, he auditioned for Karnad’s play, Thale Danda, which was translated in Hindi. “I got three roles eventually, because some people dropped out… the role of a young prince, a soldier and a girl (he looks cute any which way).”
When he joined MS Ramaiah college (he’s in the third year), he formed the Ramaiah Theatre Club along with fellow student Sabith Khan. “We put up a poster for 15 days and saw 36 people registering themselves,” says Saad. “Then I attended a two-month workshop by Vijay Padaki’s Bangalore Little Theatre. We had rehearsals for over a month and then we staged the play, A Little Bit of Lorca.”
But Khan came into his own, when he was surfing the net and ran into the script of The Trips. “It was about three hitmen who are assigned to kill a man, and how they suffer trips,” says Khan. “I changed to title to Dark Side of Comedy because I thought people wouldn’t relate to it and also fleshed out the script to last 60 minutes from the original 25 minutes.”
At an inter-collegiate mono act competition, he played a drug addict relating his bizarre experiences to a spellbound audience. But what really worked for him was the George Orwell play, The Man Upstairs. “It was about two brothers encountering the man upstairs – a madman – in a haunted house. I played the lunatic.”
Up next was The Leader, another college play, where he played the main sycophant of a leader, who eventually turns out to be headless. Says Khan: “All the five plays I staged had a moral.”
One such play was Idle Hands, which happened by chance. “I saw the film on HBO and loved the idea of how idle hands can wreck havoc in someone’s life,” says Khan. “I adapted the concept and wrote my own script.”
The show at an RT Nagar auditorium was a crowd puller. “567 people saw the play, 160 people bought tickets at the venue,” says Khan. “All my five productions were thrillers with a little bit of sarcasm. My only bad habit is that I have always tampered with the script, and I give a lot of importance to direction and music… all the music in my plays has been scored by Abhijit Shylanath, my junior in college and part of three bands, including the college band, Mutiny.”
His next idea happened while riding. “Two days back, I had seen Scream 3. From the time I started riding from Jayanagar to my house in Sanjaynagar, the story evolved. At home, I wrote the script that ran into 11 pages, and now it’s gone up to 22.”
The title’s Scream and the show is due for June 7 at the Chowdiah. “Four people have been finalised, and I am on the look out for five more,” says Khan, who is directing the play. “The byline is Cry of the Carnage. It’s a simple yet bold story about nine friends and how they come to terms with unprecedented terror surrounding their lives.”
You can reach Khan at: msrimage@rediffmail.com.
(First published in City Reporter in 2003)