Darshana Rajendran interview: On how acting went from being a hobby to a full-fledged career

Darshana Rajendran started doing theatre as a hobby initially. As she engaged more with the medium, she realised she thoroughly enjoyed it and decided to pursue it full time. Over the years, she explored other connected forms such as dubbing, voice-overs, theatre workshops and films. Remember her rendition of ‘Baawra man’ for the Malayalam film Mayaanadhi? Among the films she has been part of are C U Soon, Aanum Pennum, Hridayam, Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey, Purusha Pretham, Paradise and Rifle Club. She has acted in web series such as Ctrl Alt Del and Naya Safar. Recently, she has been part of the play Bye Bye Bypass, directed by actor Roshan Mathew. The seven shows of the nostalgia-inducing Malayalam play were embraced with enthusiasm by the Kochi audience. The play, told through the point of view of kids, is about four cousins and their soon-to-be demolished ancestral home to make way for a bypass.

Edited excerpts from an interview with the actor :

I haven’t really thought of this as coming back to doing plays because I started exploring acting, with theatre, in 2011. At that time, I had a job, and this was a hobby of sorts. It was sometime around 2014 when I decided to quit my job and spend more time with it because I really enjoyed doing it! I was looking forward to spending more time with theatre. When I started doing it professionally, I realised that theatre alone was not enough to sustain myself. So, purely out of the thought, ‘how do I keep this going?’

Darshana (third from left) in a scene from the play
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I started doing other things like doing voiceover work and dubbing, teaching, doing theatre workshops and also films. So, films are also a part of that. I want to do it all [acting related] in some way or the other. And I have been doing it all, maybe not so publicly but in my own way. I’ve also been working with children doing workshops as and when I don’t have film shoots.

With theatre, the aim was to always have it going, but because it was difficult, logistically, to make a play happen, there haven’t been plays. We did A Very Normal Family (AVNF) in 2019 with a lot of us being from the same group. Even during COVID, we did a small intimate play; we have been doing play readings together, and hosted performances at home. I have been part of theatre and I don’t think of it as coming back to it. But yes, a show like Bye Bye Bypass is difficult to get going. We started [AVNF] with a small bunch of people. Today, when one show happens, there are 25-30 people working nonstop to run it. A community has come together to run it. That doesn’t happen very often and for that I am very grateful and really excited.

Yes, we all have chipped in. The process of the play happened that way. This is Roshan’s story, and that was the departure point. It was something that happened in his life that inspired him to develop it. But when we started talking about it, we realised that the ideas are all universal. We all have that one home that we miss or that we have had to let go or we think of when we think of it as home. What is home itself but for the idea of people who are your home! All of that is universal.

It’s (Bye Bye Bypass) a devised performance: each scene has been devised by a set of actors, the musician, the writer, and the director. All of these come together to make that happen. Every day at rehearsal, it isn’t that we have a written scene. We were creating it together; so all actors have played different characters in it, like I play this character called Thumbi. But I have also played other characters; we have all switched characters and played when we were creating.

Say, in a scene, the three children meet one boy, and they become friends. We would have two sets of actors try different versions of that scene. Then we all sit together, watch it, judge it and then decide what works and what to retain. It’s all shaped by the cast and crew. We have all been involved with every thought. Everyone has a sense of ownership that way; so we all have come together with our own stories of home and each of these things, and we all contributed. It is one of those really collaborative processes that all of us have really enjoyed being a part of.

I’m going to be working on another play with this Chennai-based group called Perch. They are reviving their play, Under the Mangosteen Tree, and I’m going to get involved with that after this play. I have been active in the theatre space, but, like I said, logistically getting a play together, when most actors in Kochi are film actors, is not easy. Managing everyone’s time and making sure this happens while also working as the producer… just doing all of that work requires time. It’s been quite a task, but now we have a group that’s involved. We’ve also got a small network around it, a community of actors stepping in if one person is unavailable. We have actors who are stepping in to do stage manager jobs, with everyone pitching in to make sure this happens and that’s the only way a play like this will happen.

I have lived in many houses all around the world, so l have had to say goodbye to several houses. I am not exaggerating, but definitely over 30-35 houses. For me, the idea of home isn’t the house as such but the memories and the stories that happened there. Or the people that you share it with! It is something I have carried on because I do feel like I have many homes all around the world and they’re not my home, in reality. But I feel at home.

At one point, when I used to do only theatre, l used to be shuttling about so I had keys to many houses, many friends’ houses. When I go to Chennai, this corner in my friend’s house is mine. I’ve had sort of a longing for a home, but I also feel at home in many, many places. To be able to bring these thoughts and these ideas into this play was also great fun. We all explored our own stories with our homes. I grew up in Riyadh, moved to Kochi for high school, then I was in Delhi. Then London after that for my masters, and then I moved to Chennai where I used to work; I also used to be in Bangalore for some time. I have shifted so many times. So it’s been interesting to think about all of these homes, and this is a story that it’s not just me, but it’s something that everyone resonates to.