The Wrong Gods review – absorbing drama tackles dark chapter in India's history
Our setting is riverside in a valley in India, surrounded by a bountiful forest – a kind of prelapsarian paradise. Here we meet Nirmala (Nadie Kammallaweera, the star of Counting and Cracking and its sequel, The Jungle and the Sea), a farmer and the head of her village's council, and her precocious teen daughter, Isha (Radhika Mudaliyar, another Counting and Cracking alum), an aspiring scientist.
Nirmala, whose ancestral roots in the valley stretch generations, believes in the old, pre-Hinduism gods – and in particular the goddess: the river. Isha does too, though her voracious mind is already questioning these belief systems and questing for greater truths. Isha longs to escape back to school in the city. Nirmala, newly abandoned by her husband, needs her daughter home to help work their patch of land. The two quarrel over their competing values and visions of the world, as mothers and daughters often do.
A greater struggle is afoot: Nirmala is anxiously awaiting the arrival of 'big fat American' developers who have greedy eyes on the village, and prays to the goddess to send them packing. Isha prays to the goddess to let her go with them, back to her teacher and educational champion, Miss Devi (Manali Datar). And then, as if teleported from another dimension, Lakshmi (Vaishnavi Suryaprakash) arrives: a middle-class smooth-talker with an offer too good to refuse – and a magic packet of seeds that promises high yields with low labour. Nirmala can prosper; Isha can go to school. Worshipping different gods: Nirmala (Nadie Kammallaweera), Isha (Radhika Mudaliyar) and Lakshmi (Vaishnavi Suryaprakash). Photograph: Brett Boardman Photography/Belvoir
If this smacks of fairytale or myth, it's by design and clearly telegraphed by the play's elemental set (its stone surfaces and moss-tipped concentric circles evoking an ancient amphitheatre) and by the dialogue: Isha, it is explained, is the goddess of destruction; Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth. But there may be other clues here too: in Sanskrit, Isha means strength, guardian or protector; Nirmala means virtuous.
The Wrong Gods is doing double duty, working as a fable of capitalism and modernity, and as a primer on a specific chapter of Indian history: the government-sponsored Green Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, and its devastating impacts. Nirmala's village is a microcosm of a devilish pact in which an estimated 50 million farmers and Indigenous people were displaced by a network of dams that promised water for the cities, at the expense of natural environments and civilisations thousands of years in the making.
At the same time, the Indian government and foreign companies induced farmers to abandon old crops and methods for new high-yield varieties of wheat and corn, and synthetic fertilisers. This also came at a cost, sending millions of farmers into crushing debt cycles that spawned suicide epidemics, and upended delicate ecosystems with far-reaching consequences.
The Wrong Gods was inspired by one of the centres of this modern tragedy: the Narmada Valley, site of the Sardar Sarovar dam network – dubbed 'India's greatest planned environmental disaster'. It was also the birthplace of one of India's most successful civil resistance movements: Narmada Bachao Andolan. Isha, Nirmala and Lakshmi look on as Devi (Manali Datar) takes the floor. Photograph: Brett Boardman Photography/Belvoir
Shakthidharan spent time in the valley more than a decade ago, and The Wrong Gods offers an imagined origin story for Narmada Bachao Andolan, which was substantially led by women. Perhaps in tribute to this, not only the cast and characters but almost the entire creative team of this production, which Shakthidharan co-directs with Belvoir resident Hannah Goodwin, are women. skip past newsletter promotion
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Like many contemporary plays of ideas, The Wrong Gods suffers occasionally from speechifying and on-the-nose lines, with scenes interrupted as characters spout exposition. The extent to which audiences tolerate this may depend on how much they know of the real-world issues.
The play is generally successful, however, in bringing a massive, intractable problem down to the human scale, showing the emotions and interpersonal dynamics – and primal survival instincts – behind this epic tragedy.
The performances are great and special credit goes to Kammallaweera and Mudaliyar, who swiftly and surely bring the mother and daughter to endearing life and make us believe the relationship on to which the play's big ideas are scaffolded. Goodwin and Shakthidharan keep the drama dynamic and engaging, and pare back aesthetics and action so as to not overwhelm the text.
The result is an absorbing drama – though fans of Counting and Cracking may wish Shakthidharan lent a little less on neat parable and a little more into the human mess.
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘What if everyone didn't die?' The queer, Pulitzer-winning, happy-ending Hamlet
When he was still in his 20s and studying for a master's degree in acting, James Ijames was advised to take a swerve away from all things Shakespearean. His tutors thought his southern accent, the product of an upbringing in North Carolina, was not conducive to declaiming Elizabethan verse. Believing them, he did just one professional Shakespeare production in 10 full years of treading the boards. Now Ijames is righting that old wrong, although he does not see it quite that way. Fat Ham, his latest drama, is based on Hamlet and features a queer protagonist called Juicy, who is commanded by the ghost of his murdered father to avenge his death. Significantly, Juicy hails from a Black American family in North Carolina. 'The thing I kept hearing over and over,' he says, 'was that my regionalism – the slowness of my southern accent – would make it difficult for me to do Shakespeare. I did avoid it for those reasons. That's a little bit of what's in this. 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I'm not one of those folks who say you're homophobic because you're actually gay – but I do think you are homophobic because you think that if you get too close to a man's body, then your body might betray you.' Ijames grew up in a large family, in the small town of Bessemer City. His father worked in truck manufacturing ('He's retired military – that type') while his mother taught elementary school ('She wanted us to be surrounded by art'). What was it like growing up queer in this household, in this corner of the south? 'I wasn't in a family that was like, 'Oh, you're gay, get out of here, you're the worst.' They said, 'Just don't get in trouble.'' And the masculinity in his family contained a 'softness', something he puts down to it being mostly comprised of women. 'They were such engines of the family that it changed us. I remember thinking I should be elegant because one of my uncles was very elegant.' What about the greater forces around him, such as the Baptist church? 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The Guardian
6 hours ago
- The Guardian
Richard Greenberg obituary
The American playwright Richard Greenberg, who has died aged 67 of cancer, was an accomplished and prolific chronicler of the lives of young, upwardly mobile professionals in the 1980s – he himself had first wanted to be an architect. In doing so, he moved American new playwriting on from the era of Sam Shepard and David Mamet; he had no particular axes to grind, and he wrote beautifully. Every time you saw a play of his – he was once dubbed 'the American Noël Coward' – you understood why his household gods were Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Edith Wharton. He was serious, literate, engaging and enlightened. In his breakthrough play, Eastern Standard (1988), he anatomised a yuppie quartet of best friends and siblings sorting out their relationships as they moved from Manhattan to a summer house on Long Island. And he did so in a becalmed atmosphere of guilt-ridden privilege that got some critics' collective goats. 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New Statesman
6 hours ago
- New Statesman
I am a curse on English cricket
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And that is: whenever I go to a cricket match – and bear in mind Test matches last up to five days – England either lose terribly, or play so badly that you know they will lose, or that the day's play is so boring that I begin to wonder whether it's worth it. I could have stayed at home and listened on the radio while pottering about, and then caught the highlights on the telly if I felt like it. But there is nothing like the roar of a crowd, and it is nice to walk around as if I own the place, for in a way I do, and I can go inside the Pavilion and come within touching distance of the players as they go from dressing room to playing field, or the other way around, as the occasion demands. Now for those who don't know, English Test cricket has in recent years been transformed by the methods and approach of the captain, Ben Stokes, and the coach, Brendon McCullum, and so games that would have in the past collapsed into tedium have now become thrilling run chases. 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On Friday night I stayed at my brother's and I thrashed him at backgammon (he is a ranked player, so I love it when this happens). Saturday was more of the same and at 5 o'clock, an hour and a half before the end of play, I thought sod this for a game of soldiers and went back to Brighton. Of course, as soon I was on the Tube to London Bridge the game exploded into excitement. The cry had gone round the ground: 'Lezard's had enough! Now we can play again.' Sunday was spent in the Hove-l, sulking, while I got on half-heartedly with some work. And then Monday dawned. England were on the brink of a famous victory, and, believe me, these victories are sweeter when there has been a build-up of days behind them, and the balance of power has been switching back and forth (though mainly in the opposition's favour). So my dilemma was this: do I go back up to London and watch sporting history being made? Or do I go up to London and watch England blow all their chances and hand the prize to India? India are very good, by the way, and they absolutely clobbered England in the second Test. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Duty to my country won the day, and when the alarm went off – I was going to get there extra early to get a seat – I turned it off, turned over and went back to sleep. In the end this turned out to be the right thing to do. It was an agonising day's play, and I had radio coverage going on in all three of the Hove-l's habitable rooms, so as not to miss a second. That evening, I read a post from my friend S— on a social media platform. It was her first match, as you will be able to tell shortly, and I had been planning on meeting up with her. 'It's very nice at Lords [sic] and did you know they have two batsmen on the pitch at once? Incredible. I asked if this was a set-up unique to Lords but was told – by quite a number of people – that all cricket matches have two batsmen out at once. They do these little runs past each other but they are friends! Even more incredible.' Etc. Now this, in a way, is the best description of a cricket match I have ever read, and I've read quite a few in my time. On the other hand, I wonder if she appreciated the extraordinary nature of England's win, and my self-sacrifice. [See also: Israel's calculus on Syria] Related
