Alyque is a colleague who led Lintas in India and was also founder, director and leading actor with the Theatre Group of Bombay. He’s best known in the English-speaking world for playing Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the film Gandhi. He was on a trip to London with his wife, the actress and singer, Sharon Prabhakar, and wanted to see how the project was progressing.
This was in mid-1996, the year before the theatre was opened, and Alyque was accorded a VIP tour. It so happened that the stage had just been installed – the great apron reaching out, to be surrounded by the groundlings.
Alyque enquired as to whether the stage had yet been performed on. “No, not yet,” was the reply. So without further ado, Alyque stepped forward and, to the amazement of the hordes of tourist groups also there at the time, he declaimed Jaques’s speech from As You Like It:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
So, rather extraordinarily, whatever the books will say, Alyque was first.
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