INDIA 1948 , LESSONS FOR ALL TIME
This show is a happy return, especially if like me you missed it last summer: the National at its best, a modern epic and warning directed with flowing, endlessly entertaining seriousness by Indhu Rubasingham as a skilful ensemble evokes a continent on the big stage. Anupama Chandrasekhar is clear that in imagining Nathuram Godse – the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi – she did not want to deliver a history lesson. But she has certainly written a history play in the best tradition: a moment of transition , the fall of a foreign tyranny, riot and hopefulness around the birth of two nations. At the story’s centre a protagonist whose decent resentment of colonial brutalities is born of youthful hope, muddled by vanity and confusion, and falls prey to prophets of division and hatred.
From the moment when Hiran Abeysekera rises from the floor bloodstained and chirpy to address us about his murderous achievement, he and his imagined interactions with Gandhi and others hold you gripped. His childhood was odd: parents having lost three baby sons presumed a curse and raised him as a girl-child, who profitably spoke as an oracle inhabited by a Hindu goddess: finally he rebels, runs off demanding to be a boy (very on-trend, though of course he actually is one). Author and director do not labour this androgyny, but some of the impish, larking, beguiling , scampering cheek Abeysekera brings to the part suits it. Likewise his mystical speeches in a pink veil – a child feeling important, godlike – set the tone too for his vulnerability as a teenager to the message from the impassioned rebel Vinayak Savarkar (Tony Jayawardena, solid with importance) . Savarkar, like a brown Enoch Powell , wants India kept pure for the Hindus and wants rid of the minority Muslims – “Persians” he scornfully calls them – with their alien culture and presumed loyalties.
The boy at first adored Gandhi, father of the nation and heroically successful in his non-violent ‘ahimsa” resistance to the British Raj with its rough policing and inequitable laws . He learns, as a young tailor (under a gorgeously camp master, Rubasingham has no fear of jokes) first to be exasperated, and then angry at Gandhi’s determined ahimsan. Paul Bazely’s heavy certainty and solidity as Savarkar is nicely set against the slightly arch unworldly Mahatma of Paul Bazley, who flits through the show, with Nehru and other politicians all approaching the independence moment. For all the sense of rising disastrous belief we can share Godse’s frustration. We are not spared either moments of violence alongside beautifully choreographed gentle Gandhian demonstrations like the Salt March. At which point I should mention the beautiful simplicity of Rajha Shakiry’s set, slopes that resolve and revolve into landscape before a a light brown cloth half-woven as if on a loom awaiting the next shuttle ( weaving local cloth against giving custom to British mills was part of Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign).
So take it either way: as pure story, one man’s journey of change and corruption and the birth pangs of two nations (Partition, our greatest and most criminal of stupidities, is shatteringly evoked). Or instead simply take Godse’s story as a timeless illustration of religious-racial-cultural fanaticism, familiar still from Ireland to the Balkans and beyond, and of the way communities can be riven by mischievous messages (culture wars , say no more) and idealism twist to hatred
In the final moments, when in the afterlife Gandhi still laughs his gentle laugh and speaks of ahimsa, Godse carries on defying his role as a footnote, blaming on his foe every modern ill of the subcontinent from nuclear weapons to terror. And in a magnificently sinister racist and fascist speech, this small beguiling assassin exhorts us all to watch out. Look out any of those among us who look different, are not pure like us, those who speak strange tongues and have different cultures and therefore have no place here. Shudder, and applaud the irony.
Nationaltheatre.org.uk to 14 oct
rating 5
theatreCat 