Playing Manto
Richard McGill Murphy on playing a British soldier in the dramatisation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Naya Kanun”:
Manto’s soldier embodies colonial arrogance, which is more or less the opposite of the cultural sensitivity that I tried to maintain in my everyday life as an ethnographer. As a tall white man, I looked the part, and the costume was easy: jodhpurs, riding boots, a white linen shirt, and a swagger stick. But at first, I found it difficult to really get inside my character. In rehearsals, the director would urge me to act more arrogant. “Remember, you’re a sahib,” she would say. “These people are your servants!” She encouraged me to ad lib abuses such as “you bloody insolent black bastard,” which started rolling off my tongue with alarming fluency as the rehearsals progressed…Murphy’s translation of Toba Tek Singh here.
