Not my favorite National Theatre Live production. It’s very heavy/bleak, although it includes some powerful observations and some fine performances. It isn’t one I probably would’ve devoted the time/money to if it weren’t for National Theatre at Home, so I’m still grateful for the chance to have seen it.
In the shadow of the Mumbai airport, kids and teenagers from the slums make their living picking and sorting trash. Abdul, the 16-year-old son of the Hussain family, is the best sorter around, and the family’s comparative good fortunes put a target on their backs with their neighbors. Across town, Asha uses her influence to buy favor from those around her in exchange for housing grants or medical access, much to the consternation of her daughter Manju.
I’m only getting to this write-up a few months after watching the play, so I had to poke around online for a summary to reacquaint myself and make sure I kept all the characters straight. In doing so, I learned that it’s apparently based on a non-fiction book by the same name. As such, I fault it less for the grimness of the piece, since I presume it’s following true events. Still, the drama is strong in this one – while it takes care to depict the characters as three-dimensional, there’s an awful lot of poverty porn/suffering, and most of the major characters are put through the wringer in pretty devastating ways.
There are some interesting threads at play here. The Hussains are regarded as “rich” and “putting on airs,” even though they still live in the slums and what money they have comes from their teenage son’s trash-sorting. In this neighborhood, “rich” means putting in tile on the floor of their kitchen, the walls of which they share with their neighbors on either side. (The fact that they’re Muslim also plays a part in some people’s reactions to them.) Meanwhile, Manju gets glimpses of the opportunism her mother employs to better their circumstances, and while she wants to take a different path, bettering herself and those around her through education, intellectual capital becomes synonymous with westernness, speaking English and reading British novels. Wanting to help her friend learn, they meet in secret to discuss books at the outhouses. There’s also a supporting character, a trash picker named Sunil, who has some good narrating monologues about the ecosystem of the pickers in the slums. Looking through the garbage left by the westerners at the airport, he observes (paraphrased,) “Rich people don’t know what they have? They don’t know what they throw away!”
I knew going in that the play starred Meera Syal as Zehrunisa, the Hussain matriarch. I’ve seen Syal in various things, though like so many British actors, I remember her best from her appearance on new Who, the Silurian two-parter in series 5. She takes us through Zehrunisa’s journey from pride to fall, anchoring the tragedy in the feelings of a woman desperate to hang onto her dignity. I didn’t expect to see Anjli Mohindra (Rani from The Sarah Jane Adventures!) pop up as well, playing the Hussains’ daughter Kehkashan. I’m not familiar with any of the other actors in the show, but I also really like Stephanie Street as the calculating Asha, Anjana Vasan as the dedicated and wistful Manju, and Hiran Abeysekera as the recklessly-ambitious Sunil.
Warnings
Violence (including police brutality, torture, and self-harm,) sexual references, language, drinking, and strong thematic elements (including islamophobia.)
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Elle Men Singapore put out a short video interview with Tony Leung Chiu-wai to accompany their cover story. While it’s mostly snippets of the same stuff he says in the print interview – and then mainly the stuff that’s more about his career in general, as he doesn’t say anything specific about Shang-Chi or Wenwu – it’s still fun to see him talk about it. I love that he includes Happy Together among his favorite roles, and I like that, while many people (myself included) are amazed that he’s finally doing a Hollywood movie, he seems very casual about it.
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