Sayani Gupta’s love for Shakespeare

Sayani always wanted to portray character from Shakespeare’s writing and her dream comes true

 Sayani Gupta is currently shooting for The Hungry which is based on a famous Shakespearean play, Titus Andronicus; Sayani is now with this film living her childhood dream. The actress has been fascinated by the works of Shakespeare.

 Speaking about it, Sayani says, “I was exposed to the literature very early in life. I remember my uncle had a collection of VHS tapes which included Films that were made from the plays of William Shakespeare, like Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Julius Caesar, and of course Romeo and Juliet. These films were not in English though. They were in Russian, German etc. My cousin and I were made to sit with the original unabridged text of the plays and read it as we saw the film and reading the subtitles of it as well. This was a bizarrely complicated and taxing exercise and I would be so exhausted by the end of these Shakespearean evenings. But it did make a deep connection with the text. Later I worked very closely with Atul Kumar and then Rajat Kapoor, who adapt plays of Shakespeare in theatre in device leaving the text behind. This is again an extremely exciting and innovative way of working with the master playwright."

 Sayani's film The Hungry, which also stars Naseeruddin Shah and Tisca Chopra, is set in India and the script is quite different from the original text keeping the present times in mind. This film has been directed and written by Bornila Chatterjee and co-written by Tanaji Dasgupta and Kurban Kassam. To mark the 400 death anniversary of Shakespeare, Film London with Cinestaan had commissioned a script laboratory for scripts from UK & India which would be adaptations from different works of Shakespeare and this is the script that won and got green-lit.  Sayani says, “ It is fascinating to see that Shakespeare is still so relevant to human psyche and our lives and relationships. It was also quite exciting to work on this with Naseer (Naseeruddin Shah) on this one, who has also has a deep understanding and knowledge of the Shakespearean literature. "