By Suman Bhuchar
PAUL Bhattacharjee, who was last seen leaving the Royal Court following rehearsals for his new play, was a regular at the prestigious central London venue. His first appearance there was in 1988, at a Young Writer’s Festival curated by international director Elysee Dodgson.
The 53-year-old was due to appear in Talk Show – the sixth and final play in the Royal Court’s summer repertory season. His death, reported last week, has left the Asian theatre community devastated and bereft of a talented, well loved and admired actor.
Friends and colleagues remember him as argumentative, opinionated, generous, warm, impish and good looking.
Bhattacharjee’s story is the classic immigrant story of picking himself up by the bootstraps and making it to the top of his profession. Born and brought up in Harrow, London, the son of Gautam Bhattacharjee, a Bengali communist party activist who left India in 1942, and, Anne, a Jewish Russian migrant, he went through the state school system.
At 18, Bhattacharjee wandered into workshops run by Jatinder Verma, artistic director of then nascent theatre agitprop company, Tara Arts. Something in its principles set the course for a lifelong friendship with Verma, as well as a career in the arts. Bhattacharjee was moved by “committed” theatre and the anti-racist struggles of the Seventies. In an interview in 2008, he said: “We wanted to do something and we did it.”
Although he had no formal training, Bhattacharjee was an innate artist and began appearing regularly in Tara productions including Yes Memsahib in 1979, (about ‘coolie’ labour in East Africa). I, myself, appeared in three plays alongside him – in Inkalaab 1919, (1980, about the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre in India); Diwali (1980) and Vilayat: England Your England (1981) about an ambitious politician. It is here that he perfected his understated meticulous style of delivery, much admired later.
It was also here that he also met fellow actress Arti Prashar who became his wife and with whom he had a son, Rahul Bhattacharjee-Prashar (now 24). The couple divorced, but remained friends.
When Tara turned into a professional theatre company, Bhattacharjee, and his colleagues Shaheen Khan and Sudha Bhuchar, become ‘professional actors’ and so a new chapter in their artistic lives began. They appeared in several classic plays, including The Little Clay Cart (1984); The Broken Thigh (1986) and Tartuffe (1990).
Bhattacharjee appeared in the “committed theatre” he was passionate about and it marked the start of an enduring relationship with the Royal Court (early credits include Blood, Iranian Nights and Blood Wedding). He also began to learn theatre craft and worked as an assistant director.
In 1991, he appeared at the National Theatre in David Hare's play, Murmuring Judges (directed by Richard Eyre), much to the consternation of his other Asian actor peers who had also auditioned for the role of DC Abdul ‘Jimmy’ Khan.
At the same time, television began to open up with Asian story lines and Bhattacharjee starred in the soap Albion Market (1985) and dramas such as Lovebirds (1988), and My Sister Wife (1992). He often played the ubiquitous ‘Indian doctor’ including in the Channel 4 trilogy Turning World (1997), the Bond film Casino Royale (2006) and in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011). He played the father of Padma Lakshmi in Mistress of Spices (2005).
In Eastenders he played the baddie uncle, Inzamam, appearing regularly from 2008-2010.
“I like to play intelligent interesting, bad people on television,” he once told me.
Nevertheless, his great love was theatre and in 2004, he worked with respected director Nicholas Kent of the Tricycle theatre in Guantanamo Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, to great critical acclaim. He also appeared in The Great Game (2009) trilogy & The Bomb (2012).
One of his high points was working on the Complicite Theatre devised show, A Disappearing Number (2007-2010) (about the friendship between Professor GH Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan and the beauty of numbers). He said: “I play a very strange character who doesn’t really exist. But we have given him a name, Anindo Rao, I am a physicist and I work in CERN. I also double as the narrator of the piece. I link the worlds of the play.”
Bhattacharjee really enjoyed his experience at Complicite and said: “This is the kind of theatre I want to make.”
In 2012, he played Einstein in The Physicists at the Donmar Warehouse before portraying Benedick in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Indian set production of Much Ado About Nothing. His champagne Saturdays in his dressing room were legendary, as for much of the week he’d go home straight after the show, only occasionally stopping for a Scotch if he had a sore throat.
Bhattacharjee had many projects on the go; he was cast as Tagore in composer Nitin Sawhney’s forthcoming production of the Bengali Renaissance man, and in the Royal Court production of The Djinns of Eidgah in the autumn as well as a project with Jatinder Verma on a Pushkin story.
