I watched Einstein a few months ago, when Naseeruddin Shah performed it in Delhi. I had meant to write about it then, but somewhere along the way I seem to have misplaced the review. Perhaps some reviews need time to settle. Or perhaps I needed a few months to work out what I had actually watched that evening.
We have known Einstein without really knowing the man. We knew E = mc². We had seen him in photographs: the wild hair, the moustache, the distracted expression. We knew he was a genius. Gabriel Emanuel’s play Einstein tries to bring the man back from behind the legend.
Naseeruddin Shah looks uncannily like Einstein, enough to make you wonder, for a moment, whether Einstein has returned to complain about his socks. But resemblance is only a small part of why Naseeruddin Shah is so perfectly suited to the role. For seventy-five minutes, there is one actor, a few props and a blackboard. And yet the stage never feels empty. The German-inflected English, the slightly awkward physicality, the distracted gestures, sudden flashes of irritation, long pauses and sideways glances gradually create something more than an imitation. Somewhere along the way, I stopped watching Naseeruddin Shah. Einstein had taken over the stage.
An old man remembering his life: absent-minded, irritable, funny, vain, lonely, difficult and occasionally exasperating. A man who misplaced his keys on his wedding night, disliked socks because they developed holes, played the violin and loved Mozart. A man considerably better at solving the mysteries of the universe than the mysteries of marriage. Permanently distracted, as though his mind is conducting several experiments while the rest of him is trying to participate in an ordinary conversation. Charming and irritating almost in the same breath.
Beneath the anecdotes and eccentricities was the darker side of the play: the atomic bomb. Einstein’s ideas became entangled with one of humanity’s most destructive inventions, forcing him to confront a question far larger than his own life. What responsibility does a person bear when knowledge discovered in the pursuit of understanding is transformed into a weapon of destruction? The play does not answer that.
As a fan, I had gone to watch Naseeruddin Shah play Albert Einstein. What I didn’t expect was to forget Naseeruddin Shah altogether.
As the lights went down, the wild-haired genius from the old photographs disappeared. So did the equation, the celebrity and the poster we had seen every day in our school physics lab.
Photos and text by Prerna Jain.
