FREE OUTGOING
Royal
Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London SW1
Opened 12 November, 2007
****
Theatrically speaking, not a lot goes on during the 75 minutes of
Anupama Chandrasekhar's play. People grow increasingly distraught about
an act we did not see performed by a character who never appears
onstage. In a way, though, that is the point. The socially conservative
Tamil city of Chennai in which the play is set may differ in degree,
but not in nature, from so many other cultures in which the misfortunes
of others are just fodder for the media mill. Here, a 15-year-old
girl's after-school tryst is captured on a phonecam video which then
spreads virally. The result is that the unseen Deepa becomes notorious
across India as "the MMS girl", and everyone has an opinion on her and
her family, who come under media siege.
Over seven days, we watch Deepa's widowed mother Malini first grow ever
more strident in her condemnation of anyone else to hand: the school
principal, her less favoured elder child Sharan, 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 nebbish if he will
smuggle Deepa out past the reporters. In the end, she sees no
alternative but to collaborate with a tawdry TV programme.
Indhu Rubasingham's production contains some fine performances, from
Lolita Chakrabarti's all but constant presence as Malini to Shelley
King's single scene as the headteacher. In other respects, the staging
is too decorous: we never get any sense of the depredations of hygiene
and thirst wrought on the family and the entire complex they live in
when the media scrum interrupts water supplies. But those are not the
conditions that the play is ultimately addressing. Rather, the
characters, and Malini in particular, serve as emblems of a global
culture which on the one hand fetishises innocence and virtue, tries to
preserve them through prohibition and denial, yet is also voraciously
prurient about transgressions of these supposedly sacred values. Good
old us, all of us. Mind you, Rubasingham misses a topical trick in not
making the crucial prop an iPhone.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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