Of karma, kids and catching’ em young

HT City City diary Tuesday, 13 February, 2007
NONIKA Singh

Sisters Lushin Dubey and Bubbles Sabharwal brought a play to Town. It’s a partnership of cousins…Of two minds, working in unison, disagreeing only to agree. Well-known theatrepersons Lushin Dubey and Bubbles Sabharwal working together for last two decades, years when they formed children’s theatre group Kids World in 1987 to follow it up with theatre World (for adult theatre) in 1999, celebrate their togetherness.

Bubbles calls Lushin her “working married partner” and Lushin dubs the bonding “osmotic” which has reached a point where they can read each other. So on the surface, Bubbles might be the more effervescent, taking in the larger picture, while restrained & patient Lushin is a great stickler for details, ultimately what matters to them is the final picture their production creates.

In City with their play The Ascent Of Man, both offer similar insights on how it’s an education capsule, a great historical, very vibrant, and very biblical and combines learning with entertainment. Actually they felt the need to do children’s theatre for, as Bubbles puts it, “there is always a need in the backyard. Why, the first play Charlotte’s Web we did was in my back garden! We both had little children and could relate to children as well as felt the void in this realm.” On where children’s theatre stands today, however, they beg to differ, says Lushin: “theatre is no longer poor cousin of cinema or T.V. Be it kids’ or adult theatre, as of now, experimentation is the biggest driving force and there is greater innovation”. Bubbles adds: “children’s theatre is in a nascent phase. Sponsors are hard to come by. The spirit of working with children is great fun but the labour that goes in it is incredibly taxing”.

Besides, she finds the logistics-“often we have to be surrogate mothers to our little actors”-of doing children’s theatre enormous and mind-boggling. Interestingly, as they co-direct & co-write most of their plays including this one they brought here at invitation of Durga Das foundation, they quip” “in kids’s world, there is no segregation of roles”. Sure, both bask under the sun of individual spaces too. Lushin, all agog with Gemini Award equivalent of US Emmy that’s come her way courtesy her role in Murder Unveiled, is equally exultant about acting in Alyque Padamsee’s Macbeth. On different media, she asserts: “one has to be friends with all the media. People told me-after doing theatre, you will not like films. The truth is you cant’t compare oranges with apples”.

So she is at home, be it acting in film on Partition or a play on HIV AIDS. But then, she who is both a director’s actor & an actor’s director finds “acting not play-acting, rather it’s feeling, learning to be honest, to be yourself”. Bubble’s life is buzzing too. Apart from running a book club, her book of plays titled Runaways And Other Plays’ has just come out. She is also busy writing a novel-unfinished Karma. And combined karma of theirs, meanwhile races ahead…