We can’t help seeing matters through our
own filters. And of course, as I’ve often noted here,
subjectivity is one of the givens of reviewing. But that’s
subjectivity about artistic matters; can we achieve no better when
considering social or political points that may arise from the work we
are reviewing? Well, I guess not.
Rebuke
Look at the reviews of
Free Outgoing,
for instance: look at the reviewers who see, in the events and
attitudes of Anupama Chandrasekhar’s play, an implicit rebuke of us
Brits for our licence and laxity. There is, they imply, there is
something more understandable and, well, proper about the shocked
responses in Chennai to a 15-year-old girl having sex after school,
which act was caught on a phonecam and the video spread virally.
How sad that it wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow in Britain.
Charles Spencer remarks that “These days [teenage pregnancy is] viewed
as the most sensible way of getting to the top of the council housing
list”… which was a fiction even twenty years ago when there was such a
thing as council housing. (As an explanation for non-Britons,
much of that small portion of housing stock still owned by local
government authorities after two decades of right-to-buy policies is
now being sold off not to individual tenants but to public/private
bodies of varying degrees of conscientiousness. I hope I’ve
phrased that tentatively enough to avoid another correction!)
Only a few of us find more of interest in the responses our cultures
would have
in common to such
a situation: the commodification of the girl in question, to the point
where she becomes public property with everyone expressing an opinion
about her conduct, the combination of reproof and prurience exhibited
towards not just her but her family, the all too common media siege
which here results in the inability to deliver water to the complex
they live in. (In this respect, Indhu Rubasingham’s production is
a little too decorous; we get no sense of the depredations of hygiene
and thirst wrought on the family and their neighbours, although there’s
not really a lot that can be done on that score within the course of 75
minutes’ continuous action.) Most parents anywhere would respond
as Deepa’s widowed mother Malini does: first growing ever more strident
in her condemnation of anyone else to hand – the school principal, her
less favoured elder child, the family of the boy involved, or modern
culture in general (in a frenzy, she cuts the plug off the family
television, though the computer is left working since it drives a later
scene). Later, in her attempts to find a way out for the family,
she almost even offers herself to the office dork if he will smuggle
Deepa out past the reporters. In the end, she sees no alternative
but to collaborate with a tawdry TV programme.
And it keeps coming back to commodification, to notoriety of any kind
as a publicly tradable stock regardless of the person concerned.
This is why Caroline McGinn and Matt Wolf are right to praise the fact
that Chandrasekhar never shows us Deepa herself onstage, and why others
are wrong to bemoan that we do not see her human face. The play
is precisely about the way in which she has been denied her humanity,
turned into an icon, a topic, an MMS file – she even loses her name and
becomes simply “the MMS girl”. To show us her feelings would be
to sentimentalise the play rather than accepting its indictment of us
all.
Double-edged
Of course, matters can be spelt out too overtly. Kwame
Kwei-Armah’s
Statement Of Regret
comes with a reading list integrated into its text, with references
onstage to (and a lengthy interview in the programme with) Dr Joy
DeGruy Leary’s theories of post-traumatic slave syndrome.
Moreover, the fact that the play is set in a public policy think-tank –
in other words, a professional talking shop – is a fairly unmissable
signal that this will be a play of words rather than events. And
so it proves, being by my reckoning an hour and a half of talk followed
by 45 minutes or so of… well, “action” is putting it a little
generously, but some things happen. Kate Bassett’s remark that
“Kwei-Armah is now our black British David Hare” is surely
double-edged. (I also wonder whether the references to the play’s
protagonist changing his name from Derrick to Kwaku are a
self-defensive gesture on the part of the play’s author, who was born
Ian Roberts. I mean, why would anyone want to get rid of the name
Ian?)