My crazy bohemian Indian childhood: Actress Felicity Kendal on growing
up in the Far East and why she considers it home
By Felicity Kendal
7 April 2012
I was halfway through my second ice-cold Kingfisher beer when the door
to my railway carriage was flung open by a man who clearly meant
business.
`It is,’ he barked, `illegal to drink on a train.’
I couldn’t help but feel rather nervous. The guard had not only a
rather splendid uniform, but a large machine gun slung across his
shoulder; and here in India breaking even the smallest law could mean
a spell in jail.
Felicity Kendal poses in her Kathakali make-up and costume with a
Kathakali performer in a classical Indian dance-drama
Equally unsettling was the chance that I would lose my beer, the
thought of which had sustained me during a long and dusty day of
adventures. Outside, in the dark, the damp paddy fields of Kerala
flashed by.
`You must pay a fine,’ he said, after a tense few moments.
I sighed with relief as I fumbled around for rupees, casting a last
lingering look at those ice-cold bottles.
`Now you’ve paid the fine, you can drink them,’ he said, with a
shrug. `Just close the door.’
Settling back into my seat, I smiled. This was the India I remembered
from childhood: a place where authority is both absolute and yielding,
where chaos and order sit side by side. Romantic, emotional,
infuriating and glorious – it is a country that, for all my many years
in England, I still think of as home.
It was in India that I started my acting career, courtesy of my
parents, long before I set foot on stage in England. They headed a
company of travelling players performing Shakespeare up and down the
land. Geoffrey and Laura Kendal’s lifetime love affair with the Far
East had begun during the Second World War, when they were offered the
chance to tour with the Entertainments National Service Association
(ENSA), travelling and performing for the troops and, although they
had returned to England when the war was over, India had captured my
father’s heart.
He could think of nothing else but going back.
And so, in 1953, the Kendal family set sail for the sub-continent
aboard the SS Jaljawahar; me a plump six-year-old, my sister Jennifer
a 19-year-old beauty. Accompanying us were six other actors, men and
women ranging in age from 19 to 76.
More than 50 years after starting her acting career in India,
Felicity has made an emotional return
The cast would change over the years as our players came and went, but
the name never did: Father called the company Shakespeareana, and
while we were a rather motley gathering, we had an impressive backer.
After watching Shakespeareana perform in Malta a few months earlier,
none other than Countess Mountbatten had agreed to act as our patron.
She would, she assured my father, use her connections – among them
with the then Indian prime minister, Panjit Nehru – to smooth our
path.
She was as good as her word, but for all the cachet the Mountbatten
name brought us we were no spoiled `burra sahibs’ [important
people]. Ours was a gipsy existence, our adventures taking us far and
wide, accompanied for much of it by our mascot Sheba, a malevolent and
ferocious old tabby, whom Mother trained to walk on a lead and to keep
quietly to his basket whenever we were travelling by road or rail (my
father was never one to waste what little money he had on unnecessary
fares).
Shakespeareana’s tour itinerary was as eclectic as it was varied:
through the Countess’s connections we gave private performances to
maharajahs in their palaces, but our bread and butter was the local
theatres and schools that hosted us for weeks at a time and who chose
an assortment of our plays.
What united them was their appreciation, something that motivated my
father far more than the relative pittance our performances would
earn. From the early days of the Raj, Shakespeare had been woven into
the fabric of India’s education, and my father understood that in a
culture rich with storytelling and fantastical tales, Shakespeare’s
characters and storylines resonated in a powerful way. The audiences,
meanwhile, were far more visceral than their British counterparts. If
they got bored, they shouted, and if they liked it, they cheered.
Baby Felicity with her mother on tour in central India
When we weren’t performing we were travelling: long, tiring journeys
the length and breadth of India on trains and buses, on which the
routine never varied. Once the bedrolls had been laid out – I had a
blue one with thick leather straps and a pillow compartment in which I
kept my cuddly toys – Mother would get out the picnic. Spam, bread and
butter, cheese and onions, washed down with a soda. My pleas for the
cakes that would be presented at the windows whenever we stopped
always fell on deaf ears.
`Fly-blown, darling, don’t touch that,’ Mother would admonish.
Insects were her sworn enemies. Before lights-out she would get out
her Flit gun and spray the corners of the berth with insecticide to
discourage the cockroaches, not that it made much difference. When
money was short – which it often was – sleep was a luxury.
Travelling third class, we would share our cramped apartment with
other people, wedged against chickens and boxes. On one occasion,
space was so tight that two of the company had to cling to the side of
the train as it pulled out of the station, fastening themselves to the
rails on the door by their belts.
Felicity with her father Geoffrey at Bombay Harbour
My education was equally nomadic. Every time we moved on I joined a
different class in a different school with different girls until, aged
13, my father had taken the decision to pull me out of school
altogether.
Everything I needed, he reasoned, could be found within the rich
language of Shakespeare’s plays at which, by then, I was something of
an old hand.
After making my stage debut aged nine as Macduff’s small son in
Macbeth, I had played a number of parts, from Twelfth Night’s Viola to
The Merchant Of Venice’s Portia. By 17, I could rattle off any
soliloquy you might care to name, eat hot chillies like a native and
speak fluent Hindi, but I had never been near a pair of stockings,
owned a coat or worn gloves.
Now half a century later I was returning to my childhood land with a
BBC film crew to explore India’s love affair with the Bard, curious to
see if the passion of the audiences I remembered as a child had
survived decades of change.
I had been back and forth many times over the years to visit family,
but this time I was travelling not as a tourist or a visitor but like
a native.
I’ll confess to some nerves: over the years I’d become accustomed to a
certain level of comfort on my visits and I wondered whether a part of
me would turn my nose up at the dirty bazaars and backstreets we would
visit during filming.
I needn’t have worried: I took to it again like the proverbial duck to
water, and loved the fact that part of the magic of growing up with my
crazy parents was mirrored during my stay. One night I would sink
gratefully into the comforting clutch of a five-star hotel, waiters
fluttering around me like butterflies, the next I would stay in a
humble room furnished with little more than a bed and a mosquito
net. I even did some acting. I had been invited by leading Indian
actor and playwright Arjun Raina to revisit the role of Desdemona
(which I played in 1980 with the National Theatre Company) in his
rooftop production of Othello.
This, though, was Shakespeare with a difference. Arjun adapts the
plays and presents them as Kathakali – stylised classical Indian
dance-drama – where I was dressed in a wonderfully exotic costume and
my face covered in elaborate make-up.
So much else had changed. Many of the glorious palaces of the colonial
era are now hotels, while the grand hotels of yesteryear are schools
or government institutions. Yet in the Fifties the maharajahs retained
much of their wealth and power, and the Shakespeareana company was
able to sample some of it first-hand when we were summoned to give
private performances.
In Travancore, in the southern state of Kerala, the Maharajah sent his
royal barge to collect us, decorated like a Coronation coach, and we
lay on quilted cushions attended by crew in silks and turbans.
In Mysore, we performed The Merchant Of Venice at the Maharajah’s
private theatre, a perfect replica of a West End theatre. During our
performance, the Maharajah chain-smoked, his servant beside him
holding a silver ashtray on a long stand into which he would flick his
ash. When he had finished each cigarette he would hand the end to the
servant who would stub it out and instantly produce the next one,
which he lit with a gold lighter.
Actress Felicity Kendal with Arvind Singh in Udaipur
In Udaipur, we were greeted at the train station by a retinue of the
Maharana’s staff, who beckoned Mother and Father into the back of a
magnificent silver Rolls-Royce. The rest of the party, meanwhile,
followed rather forlornly in a motley caravan of rickshaws that wound
through the dusty streets of this splendid Mogul city to the gleaming
white palace.
I remember the Maharana’s colossal belly straining the ruby and
diamond buttons on his brocade coat as he came to greet us after the
performance, again of The Merchant Of Venice, which seemed to be a
favourite.
Just a few years later the royal family would turn their home into the
luxury hotel it is now, while today, the Maharana prefers to style
himself as plain Mr Arvind Singh. He’s the grandson of the flamboyant
man for whom we performed all those years ago, and I was astonished to
learn that he remembered us, despite being just a small boy himself at
the time.
Over a cup of Darjeeling tea he told me how my father’s performance as
Shylock had left an indelible impression. That silver Rolls-Royce,
meanwhile, was still housed in one of the hotel garages.
Countless other moments, too, jolted me back to the past. At a school
in the heart of rural India, I watched as one class studiously
prepared for their performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, gathering
props and ironing their costumes. Fifty years ago I was the company’s
nominated prop wallah – nominated in the sense that my father told me
to do it – and it was my job to beg and borrow props on arrival
wherever we performed.
It was, of course, always a nightmare and as my responsibilities grew,
so did my fears. I had sleepless nights, terrified that something
would be lost or stolen or that Shylock would have to struggle on
without a dagger and scales to claim his pound of flesh. This time
round, watching my past mirrored in the present, I heaved a sigh of
relief that this weighty responsibility no longer lay on my shoulder.
Fonder memories, meanwhile, awaited me at the Fairlawn Hotel in
Calcutta – something of an institution for expats and still run by
Violet, a redoubtable 93-year-old of Armenian descent who, despite her
own background, clung to British colonial tradition. At Fairlawn you
dressed for dinner and took gin and tonics on the veranda as the sun
set. I loved it here, and it is from this hotel that I left, aged 17,
to try my luck in England, my father’s dis-approval ringing in my
ears.
Felicity in a more familiar role as Rosemary Boxer in Rosemary and
Thyme with co-star Pam Ferris who plays Laura Thyme
`You stupid little b****r,’ he roared, when I’d told him of my
plans. `They won’t appreciate you in England. You’ll end up marrying
the first clot you meet and you’ll end up in Hell with mortgages and
misery.’
He wasn’t quite right, although it took me a while to find my feet
away from Shakespeareana’s comforting clutches. Desperately homesick,
it was more than a year before I secured my first acting job, all the
while my father’s irascible but loving letters reminding me what I was
missing.
My first marriage, at 22, to one of my leading men, Drewe Henley,
certainly did not elicit his approval, although he later proved to be
a tower of strength when, ten years later, the union broke down.
Felicity looking glamorous in Strictly Come Dancing with Vincent
Simone
He remained, however, horrified by the notion that I should have to
audition for anything – as far as he was concerned I had more than
proved myself – although as the years went by and my career went from
strength to strength he eventually became my biggest champion, while
simultaneously stubbornly clinging to his own itinerant and bohemian
lifestyle. Staring out over the gardens as I took tea with Violet, I
could remember the anguish of my teenage self as if it were yesterday.
Fairlawn may remain, but much else has changed. In Bangalore, a city I
had not visited for more than 40 years, I could barely recognise a
thing.
I attended The Sacred Heart Convent School when our tours brought us
here, and remember my ayah [nursemaid] Mary bringing me my lunch in a
tiffin carrier [a nest of metal containers used to carry hot food]
from our hotel kitchen, while in the evening I would skip home along
the sun-dappled streets with their middle-class homes.
Today, though, they are long gone, the streets populated by grand
hotels and skyscrapers. They are, of course, handsome in their own
way, but it wasn’t difficult to feel a sense of nostalgia.
Some things certainly hadn’t improved with modernisation, including
rail travel. For all its chaos it used to be rather romantic, the open
windows allowing you to travel to a backdrop of warm air and the
smells of the changing countryside. Now they have air conditioning,
the windows are closed and are all too often filthy.
Aside from the brief fuss over our Kingfisher beers, there were
moments on some journeys where we could have been in Crewe.
Yet for all that, there was magic and romance in the most unexpected
places too. In northern India we visited a high-security prison, home
to some of the country’s most serially violent men, where I watched a
performance of King Lear that moved me to tears.
One of its stars was a man who was memorably known as `Three and a
half’, a grisly reference to the fact that he had cut his four murder
victims into little pieces, but got only halfway through with the last
one. Yet here he was, in his prison courtyard, part of a performance
of astonishing passion and sensitivity.
Such is their affection for their theatrical life that this unorthodox
team of players frequently perform outside the prison too, without
guards or security. How, I asked their director, could he trust them
not to run away?
`I have asked them that and they all say the same thing,’ he told
me. `They ask me who would play their part if they did.’
Felicity with her first husband Drewe Henley in the programme ‘Gone,
and never called me mother’
This is the thing that my father understood instinctively: that the
language of Shakespeare speaks to Indians in a special way, whatever
their background. There is no other author performed so extensively,
whether in the traditional form or interpreted by the dancers and
storytellers who are such a rich part of their native culture.
Family honour, respect for your elders, all these themes still
resonate and, when they watch his plays, there is no part of the
stories they find old-fashioned. They inherited Shakespeare, but in a
way have made him their own.
The funny thing is that when I returned to India to make this
documentary I didn’t think it would be about my parents, or my
father’s vision, but as time went on I realised that he was impossible
to escape.
Everywhere I went I met people who remembered our little company
travelling through their villages, or who had been told of our
exploits by their grandparents.
I realised that in his own way, Geoffrey had left his own vivid
imprint here. He never wanted stardom, or even recognition, but if he
were alive today he would be so pleased that Shakespeare was
still being played and appreciated in the country that he loved until
the day he died.
And he would definitely have approved of me keeping my hands on those
Kingfisher beers.
Felicity Kendal’s Indian Shakespeare Quest will be screened on BBC2 in
May. The programme is part of the BBC’s Shakespeare Season, which
opens this month.