Lillete Dubey and Vijay Crishna in a performance of Dance Like A Man

The cast of Dance Like A Man: (From left) Vijay Crishna, Joy Sengupta, Lillete Dubey and Suchitra Pillai. Picture by Amit Roy

Dame Maggie Smith

There is a great sense of occasion at Waterman’s Theatre in Brentford, west London, where Lillete Dubey has just come off the stage after a wonderful 400th performance of Mahesh Dattani’s play, Dance Like a Man.

Lillete is joined by three of the other cast members, who have all held the audience through the entire play — Vijay Crishna, Joy Sengupta and Suchitra Pillai.

Suchitra, an old friend from her London days — she does an “Indian accent” better than anyone else — fits in her acting, music and showbiz reporting career in Mumbai, with being a mother.

“I have a three-and-a-half year old baby girl, Annika,” she revealed happily. “I keep telling Lillete I have to keep my role going till my daughter can do my role.”

As for Joy, who was born in Calcutta, grew up in Delhi and now lives in Bombay, he has given up doing stuff for television but makes it a point to act in Bengali films, such as Chaturanga, Patalghar, Bhalo Theko “which was Vidya Balan’s first film in 2003” and Kagojer Bou.

India isn’t quite as bad as in the days when people said: “Art is a hobby or only the elite should indulge in it,” but, according to Joy, there is “still a stigma that male dancers carry because dancing has been regarded as a female activity”.

All clearly love being in Dance Like a Man because they have been in the cast for most of the 13 years Lillete’s Primetime Theatre Company has been doing the play. She set up Primetime 20 years ago because she felt the majority of English plays performed in India were adaptations of the works of western playwrights.

“So the idea was we will do English but we will do our kind of English,” she explained. “So what happened with Monsoon Wedding many years later was what we wanted and began to do — meaning very Indian in spirit, very Indian in tone, in its whole feel and thematically such that it was rooted very strongly in an Indian context and had an Indian voice. But it would have themes that would appeal across the board.”

Dance Like a Man, which is hugely enjoyable and has some very fine acting, has travelled the world from Singapore to Lahore and America. “The New York Times gave us a rave review,” recalled Lillete.

Dance Like a Man is about a stern Indian father who is quite willing to put up with a daughter-in-law who wants to dance professionally but he does not think it is a manly occupation for his son. Over the years, many films and plays have had similar themes — the unbending father who would much rather his son became a lawyer or a doctor, not a poet, singer or artist.

However, in today’s India of excessively pushy parents, a playwright ought to take account of the new realities. One can imagine a son defiantly telling his father and mother: “I hate you, I don’t want to be a cricketer like Sourav, I want to do development economics at Jadavpur.”

One has to admire Lillete who refused to issue explanatory notes and glossaries with meanings of the Indian words when the play toured America, for example. Her logic was simple: “They don’t do it for us when we go to see their plays; why should we do it for them when they come to see our plays?”

But so far as western standards of acting are concerned, Lillete has been won over by Dame Maggie Smith and Dame Judi Dench, both 76, who have been fellow cast members in the English film, The Great Exotic Marigold Hotel, which has been shot in Jaipur and Udaipur and is due for release later this year. The film, in which Lillete plays Dev Patel’s mother — they run a retirement home in India for British couples who come from the UK — has been directed by John Madden, whose credits include Shakespeare in Love.

She was taken aback to discover “people who are so down to earth. I am used to working with Bollywood stars. They are lovely to me — but they have this ‘who they are’ thing.”

For the first time in her career, Lillete admits she won her role only after an audition.

She found Maggie Smith did something which no Bollywood actor would ever countenance. For one of Lillete’s scenes, in which Maggie had to utter “only a four-word line off camera”, the latter remained on set on a very hot day and repeated her line for every take.

Lillete’s exchange with Maggie is revealing.

“I went to her and said, ‘Maggie, I’m so touched, I can’t believe you sat through six hours just giving this line.’

‘Darling, that’s my job.’

I said, ‘In India nobody would do that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that for this four-word line, off camera, nobody would stay.’ But she said, ‘That’s shocking.’

‘Shocking or not, that’s the truth.’

I am giving you an example of her professionalism and dedication, no murmuring, no saying, ‘Oh, my God!’ or ‘Can I go?’, not once.”

PRIVATE GOES PRIVATE

Journalists and many lawyers fear Britain’s privacy laws are becoming almost draconian — and preventing coverage of the sexual exploits of the rich and famous.

For example, a glamour model, Imogen Thomas, 28, has had a six-month affair with a Premier League footballer, a married man, but the courts have ruled the latter cannot be named by newspapers.

The privacy laws have also been used to protect the identity of a leading actor, also married, who is said to have slept with Helen Wood (in picture above), a 23-year-old prostitute who said her past clients had included the Manchester United footballer, Wayne Rooney.

In the latest case, newspapers have been warned they cannot reveal the identity of a well-known married man working in the entertainment industry who had an affair with a colleague — to protect his children from playground bullying. The woman was furious when she was sacked.

Imogen Thomas: which EPL footballer did she score?

The appeal court judge, Lord Justice Ward, ruled: “The benefits to be achieved by publication in the interests of free speech are wholly outweighed by the harm that would be done through the interference with the rights to privacy of all those affected.”

To be sure, not everything that is “of interest to the public” is “in the public interest”. But newspapers, which for decades have traded on who is sleeping with whom, have a just point when they complain that overprotective privacy laws allow the rich and famous to get away with flouting the norms of society.

Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who has launched an inquiry into the proliferation of privacy rules, expressed concern: “Privacy law is growing and growing and growing. There seems to be no structure to it at all.”

At this rate, no one should be surprised if India’s prime paramour, N.D. Tiwari, shifts to London.