I haven’t read Rohinton Mistry’s novel, but this dramatisation by Tamasha has put him on my Urgent list.
The setting is India’s infamous Emergency under Mrs Gandhi in the 1970s, and a huge portrait of her, looking like an ill-tempered nurse, stares at you from the rear wall. The Emergency years were almost as bad as Mugabe’s antics in Zimbabwe today, but the play doesn’t let on how it came about: you simply get a picture of the grinding poverty of shanty towns in a caste-ridden country. Dina, a Parsi widow (Sudha Bhuchar), makes a living, just, by letting her rented flat to beggars — village tailors who have moved to town to serve a shifty beggar-master. The play leaves a few loose ends. Example: a man is forcibly sterilised, but most people won’t know that this was an Emergency measure run by Mrs G’s deranged son Sanjay. I think Tamasha is trying to pour a quart novel into a pint play. Still, it comes across as a moving but unsentimental homage to endurance, asking for no pity, only understanding. Two stars
Advertisement
Lies Have Been Told
Trafalgar Studios
I met Robert Maxwell once.
I’m not name-dropping, only presenting my credentials for saying that when Philip York comes in, big and brazen, the resemblance is uncanny: the stately, swaggering walk, the hooded eyelids, the rich, big voice to threaten and command, the devious, obnoxious charisma inspiring a sense of reluctant admiration. Rod Beacham’s one-man play is neither an indictment nor an apology. It’s a portrait of a war hero, an operator, a crook, a man who made his dreams of power come true, only to end in a nightmare. What the play reveals is that Maxwell, haunted by childhood poverty, could not bear the idea of failure. When it happened, it was always the fault of others. I think he was disliked by the Establishment not because he was foreign and Jewish, but because he couldn’t cover up his power-hunger with the requisite bland joviality; he never quite acquired the Englishness he so proudly thought he had. York’s performance leaves you with a sense of waste: Maxwell could have been a champion, but he was only a contender. Three stars
Advertisement
What Every Woman Knows
Royal Exchange, Manchester
JM Barrie’s 1908 play is a warm-hearted, old-fashioned fairy tale of marriage, politics and what Barrie thought was feminism. Mark Arends is the self-made, conceited young Scottish geek who wants to make it in politics, quite unaware that it is his upper-middle-class wife (Jenny Ogilvie) who feeds him the ideas that make him a success. That’s what every woman knew then. What every woman knows now is that given guts, brains and ambition, women can make it in politics, leaving geeks of both sexes to vegetate as lobby fodder. If Granville Barker had written this, it would have been a very dark comedy: he knew a bigot, oozing Presbyterianism, would never admit to inferiority. Part of the problem here is that Braham Murray’s production is short on irony. He respects Barrie’s riffs of arch Caledonian humour, which makes the characters less funny than they might be. The same goes for much of the acting. No need to mock them; too many old-fashioned gestures and intonations can have the air of an animated museum. Michael Elwyn’s power broker is the real thing: wheeling-dealing spiced with irony. Two stars
Advertisement