|
Magazine
The `Bend it like Beckham' girl
|
TIMERI N. MURARI recounts working with Parminder Nagra, the star of `Bend it like Beckham,' who played the lead role in his play `The Square Circle' at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre.
|
Parminder Nagra in a scene from `Bend it Like Beckham'.
I WAS looking for a good, young actress to play the lead role in my play "The Square Circle" which was to be staged at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre. Where does one find the right actress or actor? In the U.K. they have Spotlight. It comes in four thick volumes, heavier than a telephone directory, and on every page are four black and white headshots of actors (male — two directories) and actresses (female — two directories). I spent a few days in the library going blind looking for an Asian actress. There are, surprisingly, quite a few of them working in the profession. (I also needed two other actresses for minor roles but without the lead, I wouldn't have a play at all.) The lead role was very demanding — she would be on stage from lights up to the final curtain. Apart from being able to emote — shyness, anger, fear, love; the whole gamut of emotions in two acts — she would also have to be very physically fit. She would have to run fast, "swim" and play a very demanding rape scene too.
My producer, Vayu Naidu, had suggested one name — Parminder Nagra. "If you can get her, you'll have a terrific play. She's great." We arranged a casting call down in London, in a hall just off Tottenham Court Road. Word had got out and more faces than I'd expected turned up for the auditions. They were asked to do an improvisation and act out a page of the script. Some of the actresses were older than their touched-up photographs, while the younger ones didn't quite have what I was looking for. Vayu and I began to worry that Parminder wouldn't come, as by late afternoon we were getting a bit dispirited. I did cast two of the minor roles and a male role. And then a tiny dishevelled girl wandered in — she was in baggy jeans and a baggy coat that reached her ears. She had a pretty oval face and bright eyes peering out from the shadows of her collar. Parminder improvised and read, it came so easily to her, even casually, and then she vanished, not waiting to hear my decision.
I sent her my play and called her a couple of days later and we met at the Soho house for a coffee. This time, she dressed up, only a bit, and she said she liked the play a lot and would love to do it. But... ! I discovered that Parminder was making a reputation for herself in the small circle of theatre and television and she wasn't sure she'd be available on my dates. The second "But" was that she didn't like Leicester — although it was her hometown. She was vague as to where her grandparents came from in India — somewhere in the Punjab she said, not too interested, and she spoke with a Leicester accent. She'd never been to India. She'd let me know, she said.
I pursued her and won her over. She agreed to play the lead with a tiny reluctance — the role was very demanding and she would have to perform it five days a week for two and a half weeks. We began our rehearsals in Leicester — six days a week from 10-5 — and I discovered the delight of working with a talented actress. She had a wonderful sense of innocence (my village girl), which could switch to maturity. She could laugh and subtly turn that into tears. As a director, what I appreciated most was that she had an excellent memory — not so much for the lines, but if we experimented with a scene and I changed my mind, she could immediately return to playing it the original way. Even if we experimented a dozen times, I just had to say "let's try it again the way we did it the day before yesterday" and Parminder would re-create that performance exactly the way I remembered it, with every nuance and glance.
Unlike my other cast, she'd not formally trained as an actor. They'd been to Bristol, RADA and other acting schools and were very good. Parminder was totally instinctive. She'd grown up in Leicester and her parents had split. When we started rehearsals she stayed a couple of days with her grandmother but that didn't work out — constant rows about her being an actress — and she moved in with a cousin. I don't believe she visited her mother at all. "Arguments," was her excuse. I left the hardest part of her role — the rape scene — for the second week. Luckily, for Parminder, her "rapist" was a good friend of hers, Nitin Ganatra, a marvellous actor. The scene was very physically demanding and I had Renny Krupinski, a fight director, choreograph the rape. Parminder was physically assaulted, touched, stroked, hit by her "rapist" and she played it bravely as a professional actress. In the actual performance on stage, (five times a week) with the brooding and dramatic lighting, it was a scary scene, yet very moving. Every night the audience flinched.
Over the weeks, you do get close to the people you're working with. But once the final curtain falls, the "family" splits into many pieces — everyone moving onto other work. But Parminder and I remained friends. My wife and I had dinner with her and her boyfriend, a singer-actor, where she cooked a typical Punjabi dinner — roti, dhal, sag, chicken — and that did surprise me. With a family life in shambles and having never been to India, I thought she would have totally disconnected from her roots.
The last time I saw her in London, she was excited about being cast in the main role of a feature film. She was going to play a girl who wanted to play football like Beckham. And when you do see "Bend it like Beckham," you'll understand what a really good actress Parminder Nagra is.
The writer can be contacted at: tnmurari@hotmail.com
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
