Veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah is set to portray author Salman Rushdie in 27 Seconds, a stage production based on the writer's account of the assassination attempt on his life.
The incident took place on the morning of August 12, 2022, at the amphitheatre of the Chautauqua Institution in New York State. The knife attack nearly cost Rushdie his life and left him permanently blind in his right eye. The play will now bring Rushdie's harrowing experience and his reflections on the attack to the stage.
“I have been an admirer of Naseer's for a very long time. I'm delighted he has taken on this project,” Rushdie told Hindustan Times.
Work on the stage adaptation began sometime after Rushdie's book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was published in 2024. Kaushik Sen, the dramaturge behind the play, and Naseeruddin Shah approached the author's team to obtain the rights to adapt his memoir for the stage.
“Salman Rushdie responded warmly. The only caveat was that the script had to have words from his book. So, everything that anybody says in this play is directly from the text," shared Arghya Lahiri, co-director of the play with Shah.
Lahiri said that once the script was ready, Shah gave it another round of edits. The revised version was then read through and reviewed by Ratna Pathak Shah, a founding member of theatre group Motley.
When asked what fascinated Arghya Lahiri about this particular project, the writer-director replied, "The book itself is surprising because you go into it thinking you're going to read a work that recounts, in graphic detail, the attack and its aftermath from the pen of one of the most powerful writers this and the previous century has known,”
He added, "But it is also a book about the creative process. About censorship; ideas about religion; about how narratives are created, about how what we have always presumed is the truth and certain tenets that we live our lives by, respect for human life being the main one.”
27 Seconds will be staged at the Prithvi Theatre Festival on November 2 and 3. The performances are scheduled for 8 PM on November 2 and 6 PM and 9 PM on November 3.
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