A Dharker shade

What makes being an actress enjoyable? In Ayesha Dharker’s view, it’s the ability to dip into stories of people, whether factual or fictional. “Acting is the best job for a nosy person,” jokes Dharker, at the offices of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in Stratford-upon-Avon, where she is playing Titania in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to mark the 400th death anniversary of Shakespeare. The next performance is just a few hours away, but Dharker comes across as relaxed and enthusiastic. “I love stories, and people carry their stories around with them. I’m the kind of person who sits on a bus pretending to read a book but actually just looks around…,” she says with a gentle smile.

Dharker has had a career that has given her access to all sorts of stories. She played Emilia in Othello for the RSC last year, and has tried her hand at everything from soap operas (Britain’s long-running Coronation Street) to Hollywood ( Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones ), musicals ( Bollywood Dreams) and indie cinema (the comedy Outsourced ).

At just 19 she portrayed the suicide bomber in Santosh Sivan’s Tamil film The Terrorist , loosely based on the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. A difficult role, it was a formative one for Dharker, who recalls it as the one that convinced her to pursue acting professionally.

Her acting career began more than a decade previously as a schoolgirl in Mumbai. Eager to bunk a maths lesson, eight-year-old Dharker auditioned for the lead part in a French film about a young girl who believed she’d been reincarnated. Being part of the film opened to her new worlds (she got to go to Paris and see billboards of the film plastered along the Champs Élysées), and brought her new roles, including in Dominique Lapierre’s City of Joy , for which Om Puri and Shabana Azmi took her under their wing (she still refers to them as Ma and Baba). The experience taught her how the world of film could be a nurturing one. “A light bulb went off in my head — I realised that they are not only amazing artistes but incredible human beings too.” It’s a lesson she’s held on to till this day. Critical of reality TV where experts sneer at the talents of aspiring artistes, she stresses it’s not the way for anyone to pursue their career. “The creative world is not a mean, closed, competitive space, and if you are finding it is, you need to get out of there and find people you can relate to. It is there to shine a light on the world; it should be something that makes you blossom and open up.”

Dharker’s willingness to try different roles has meant she’s largely avoided being pigeonholed (though, like all ethnic minority actors, she’s received her fair share of cringe-worthy scripts). “I am extremely lucky. I feel I have come at the right time and stand on the shoulders of people who have dealt with that kind of thing all their lives.”

Dharker sees her mixed heritage as an advantage — her Indian father and Lahore-born mother met in Glasgow and eloped to Mumbai — and one that has left her open to all sorts of opportunities. “I don’t think we’re made to be fitters-in,” she says of her feeling of not belonging to any particular country or culture. “People get very hung-up on approval, belonging and being accepted, but they dampen their own ambition and they stop themselves from achieving.”

She’s keen to maintain her own identity — including her Mumbai accent, which she embraces in her role as Titania, as in all others. “If you are going to cast someone who looks like me, let’s extend it to who I sound like…You can tweak it up or down but it’s nice to have a flavour of what you sound like.”

Playing Titania at the RSC is “heaven” for her, not least because the innovative travelling production, which also draws on local amateur groups, will take her to Glasgow and the opportunity to visit the places she’d long heard of from her parents. She points out that Shakespeare is one instance where the Indian school tradition of rote learning comes in handy. “This stuff is worth learning!! Shakespeare’s obsessed with human beings and layers it on stories that are completely unlikely and events that are ridiculously coincidental — it’s just magical and comes alive when you speak it!”

We move on to discussing the future. She’s very enthusiastic to do more with the independent film scene in India “There is just so much happening, particularly if you compare it to British cinema, which is on its knees. The depth of variety and talent and technical skill we boast in India — it just doesn’t compare.” She is sad that in the theatrical space, there is nothing with the resources and creativity of the RSC to nurture talent and passion, pointing out that talented artistes in India are mostly forced to “subsidise their theatre habit” with other work.

Dharker, mother of a three-year-old who loves stories of adventure, rough and tumble, has lighter ambitions too, and is eager to have a go at “kids’ stuff”. “If I were to choose anything I’d love to be a pirate. That would be my dream. If I could go from this to being a pirate, I would die happy.”

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