Visual Art Representing Annawadi Behind the Beautiful Forevers Play Set

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, David Hare's accommodation of Katherine Boo'southward Pulitzer Prize-winning book, works as both play and portent. Viewed on its ain terms, the evening grips throughout in its embrace of the multiple contradictions of contemporary Indian life as here filtered through those existing quite literally off the scrap of that country'south gathering economic power.

Even more importantly is what Rufus Norris'due south epic staging – this managing director's most confident work yet at this accost – may indicate about the sort of National Theatre nosotros take in store when Norris launches his artistic directorship for skilful in the bound.

At that place has been some concern expressed – not least from Norris himself – about his lack of experience in the classical canon, to which Beautiful Forevers represents an firsthand rebuke. Productions of, say, Hamlet are a dime a dozen, merely how many people could pull off an evening on this scope and scale with such dispatch? The projection, too, has unleashed an energy that hasn't always been evident in Hare's work of late. And if an incident-packed second half sometimes seems to be moving from climax to climax, that gathering urgency only amplifies 1's appointment with a cross-section of characters whom one doesn't meet oft on this or whatsoever stage.

The American journalist Boo spent well over iii years in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi, chronicling the denizens with a item that gives a slice of concerted not-fiction a novelistic, even Dickensian feel. How, then, to bring both people and events into manageable theatrical form? Hare deftly fillets his source material and allows Norris's astute eye (and a truly exemplary cast) to do the rest. Early worries that a parade of characters speaking in direct address to the audition would issue in the story feeling as if information technology were being narrated as opposed to dramatised soon fall away – so much so, in fact, that a rather sharp ending leaves one wondering what has since happened to a half-dozen or more people whose fates we have come very much to intendance most.

And though the material might seem geographically and temperamentally removed from the habitual terrain of a dramatist who has spent his career (much of it at the National) chronicling what he has called "the loveless English", Hare gracefully elides any perceived divide. It'southward not just that the Hare-isms are there to be spotted: a line nearly needing but one good pupil to make a teacher'due south life worthwhile echoes a sentiment previously expressed in Skylight. But the larger themes of dislocation and loss, whether familial or economic, take coursed through Hare'south work from the outset, an earlier Indian-set play (A Map of the World, from 1982) indicating something of the global reach that Backside the Beautiful Forevers follows up on with real force.

The landscape hither is rife with the aforementioned clashes of course, caste, and financial circumstance that Hare has long anatomised on dwelling house turf. The specifics, though, take been displaced a continent away to a rubbish-strewn Mumbai community lying below the aerodrome flight path in which a neighbourly grievance escalates into a wider tragedy that ends past putting an entire way of life on trial. Such Englishness every bit in that location is arises out of the want of the education-minded young Manju (a charming Anjana Vasan, pictured above left), daughter of the local fixer Asha (Stephanie Street), to try to come to grips with the plot of Mrs Dalloway. A subsequent conversation about the classification in Congreve'south The Way of the World – of all unlikely topics – delights by dint of its very incongruousness.

And while the younger men at the same fourth dimension scramble to get past as either "sorters" or "keepers" of the detritus that is their environmental lot, the imposing matriarch, Zehrunisa (a violent-eyed Meera Syal, the name role player in a cast that is notable throughout), finds herself at grievous odds with the vengeful, one-legged Fatima (Thusitha Jayasundera, here marking her second David Hare play in a row), the prostitute who lives on the other side of the kitchen wall. As free with her body every bit the sweary Zehrunisa is with her tongue (between this and the Sophie Stanton graphic symbol in Made in Dagenham, onstage expletives are quite the thing at the moment), Fatima turns galloping green-eyed into an deed of self-immolation that threatens ruin on multiple fronts and lands Zehrunisa's eldest son, Abdul (Shane Zaza, in a breakout performance), in the legal dock.

The first half so skilfully weaves together the narrative strands that one feels after the interval as if all involved are having to shrink the various stories unduly in order not to turn a iii-hour play into a TV mini-serial. Simply that sense of backlog in its style also honours surely the largest and all-time Asian ensemble the National has always hosted, all of whom hogtie attending and make 1 wish for notwithstanding more fourth dimension in their company. Playing a sort of inverse Candide hard-scrabbling his way through this worst of all possible worlds in perpetual promise of betterment and self-improvement, Zaza anchors proceedings with unshowy ease, leaving the greater pyrotechnics to the endearingly rabid Hiran Abeysekera as Sunil, the nearly determinedly agile of the scavengers attempting to spin decline into gilded. (The two actors are pictured higher up.)

I had some concerns in advance that this might be i of those occasions in which we are aware of money beingness conspicuously spent to replicate the conditions of poverty, though in fact Katrina Lindsay (sets) and Paule Constable (lighting) between them navigate the hard chore of depicting weather condition without prettifying them. And Norris artfully only never over-pictorially does the balance, moving from monsoon conditions to the separate shower from upwards in the flies of a pour of plastic, from the intimate to the epic and back again with near-cinematic ease. In so doing, he reminds us that the National's implicit remit, its proper noun notwithstanding, has ever embraced the international, equally well. Seen from that perspective and others, equally well, Backside the Beautiful Forevers marks quite a beginning.

• Behind the Cute Forevers in repertory at the National Theatre / Olivier

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Source: https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/behind-beautiful-forevers-national-theatre

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