Tannishtha Chatterjee and Sharib Hashmi face up to cancer onstage

It has been astonishing and therapeutic being in the cancer sisterhood circle of actor Tannishtha Chatterjee. As a Stage 3 cancer survivor of nine years now, I know that the cancer experience is not only brutal to the body and spirit, it can also be isolating. Through her diagnosis, treatment and arriving at remission, spanning several months since the beginning of 2025, 46-year-old Chatterjee flipped that common experience of alienation on its head by allowing a community of friends to grow and rally around her. “When you are fighting cancer, the love is everything,” she has told me several times. A simple thought that would resonate with anyone going through cancer.

Meanwhile, during this time, the actor, known for her roles in Brick Lane (2007), Road, Movie (2009) and Parched (2015) among several others films, finished the post-production work of her debut as a writer-director with Full Plate, a story about a Muslim cook having to learn how to make vegan food at the home where she works, walked the red carpet at the 2025 Busan International Film Festival with the film’s premiere, amped up her daily classical music riyaaz and went back to her first love, theatre, which she learnt at the National School Of Drama to co-write the play Breast Of Luck. Her cancer journey has been one of creative ferment, connection and humour. That’s also her “therapy”, she says.

A lot of that sanguine spirit infuses the sharp humour and raw honesty in Breast of Luck, which premiered last weekend at the G5A Foundation in Mumbai. It’s being performed at the YB Chavan auditorium on 4 February, World Cancer Day, as part of the annual Kala Ghoda Festival.

Chatterjee’s co-creator and companion in this project is actor Sharib Hashmi, 50, whose wife, Nasreen Hashmi, has battled oral cancer with five surgeries on her face and neck, and other forms of treatment, and continues to live life with remarkable gusto.

The friendship between the two actors goes several years back, and the idea for doing a play together hatched long before cancer touched their lives. Chatterjee recalls, “A few years ago, Sharib and I were shooting in Dehradun for a film. At that time, we had planned a two-actors play about two chalk-and-cheese characters and through their dynamic explore ideas about art and how technology today threatens creativity.”

Chatterjee happened to meet Hashmi the day her biopsy report confirmed that she had Stage 4 cancer. “The first two people who I cried with was Sharib and Nasreen. They gave me courage. That evening itself, we tweaked our original idea to create a cancer rom-com. The structure was done, the title was decided that very day,” Chatterjee says, “We went out drinking that night with another actor friend joining us, who happened to tell confused, scared and devastated me, “Boobs hi to hai na, katwa lo!”, and we laughed uproariously.” That line made it to the play’s dialogues. “I returned home that night with a heavy heart, but also with hope,” Chatterjee says.

Hashmi, known for portraying JK Talpade in the Amazon Prime series The Family Man, channeled a lot of the singular grief-meeting-hope emotion integral to his caregiving experience as a spouse to co-write Breast of Luck with Chatterjee. “It has been a very enriching experience doing this play. We let go of rules and methods for this. We would sit at a cafe and jam, and completely went with our instinct for the story’s movement,” Hashmi tells me over coffee.

Breast of Luck is about Sheila Roy, a singer committed to her classical music origins and holding on to her artistic fire and integrity despite hardship in Mumbai, and Arun Mohan, a stock-broker and content creator uninterested in most things that somehow don’t relate to money. After their initial struggles forming a connection, Sheila’s cancer diagnosis and the months after that, catalyse a relationship between the two that anchors itself on compassion, support, respect—and an attraction fuelled by their characters’ differences.

Chatterjee and Hashmi are chalk and cheese as characters in Breast of Luck, and also in their acting styles. While Chatterjee’s craft is more realistic, Hashmi loves to play to the gallery and has more of a physical, exaggerated style. They perfectly complement each other in this multi-media, multi-sensorial experience.

Leena Yadav, Chatterjee’s friend who directed her in the film Parched (2015), attended an early reading of the play with the two actors, and took on the director’s role for Breast of Luck—her first foray into theatre. “There’s no family or no person today who is not touched by cancer. It is a reality we live with. Being on this journey has been emotional as well as exciting. We try to balance many ideas like artistic freedom, gender, body image, masculinity. along with the harsh realities of living with cancer, and of course balance humour and intensely painful emotions,” Yadav says.

The backdrop of this play is a big screen, where scenes of Chatterjee going through her chemotherapy cycles play out in between scenes. The real-life footage is a narrative propeller, and the play’s emotional centre—do you laugh at Tiger Tan, as her friends have begun to call her, as she belts out raga after raga to relieve herself of the excruciating pain as the nurse injects the chemo cocktail into her thigh? Or do you cry?

Chatterjee has been planning the play all along. “I wanted Sharib to be there at the hospital sometimes, and I wanted our interactions on camera keeping the play in mind,” Chatterjee says. Cinematographer Deepti Gupta, who has earlier directed the compelling documentary Shut Up Sona (2019), a part of Chatterjee’s sisterhood circle, has captured the harrowing—and, in this case, also humorous—experience of going through cancer treatment in a home-video verité style, complementing the play’s narrative.

After two performances, the play has received a lot of love and praise.

“We perform in Lucknow after our Mumbai run. I hope it goes to many places,” Chatterjee says. Early in her career, Chatterjee inadvertently became an advocate for skin colour-based discrimination. But she never let herself be pigeon-holed. “I definitely don’t want to be known as the actor who got breast cancer!” she says.

‘Breast of Luck’ will be performed on 4 February at YB Chavan Auditorium, 4pm, and at the PL Deshpande Auditorium on 11 February, 4.30pm.