Tamasha theatre company succumbs to ineptitude in attempting to transfer A Fine Balance by the major Indian novelist Rohinton Mistry from page to stage.
This award-winning novel, published in 1995, offers a panoramic view of Indira Gandhi's terrifying state of emergency in the mid-1970s. I have not read the book so can only respond to the dismal theatrical experience that Tamasha's artistic directors, Kristine Landon-Smith and Sudha Bhuchar have created: they jointly adapted the novel and respectively direct and star.
Still, this kalaidescopic impression of Indian's poorest in decline and fall, premiered at Hampstead last year to mixed reviews, both engaged and horrified me.
Gandhi's virtual dictatorship wrecks or finishes lives in a caste-orientated society. A central narrative charts the forming and dissolution of a household bound together by financial necessity.
Sudha Bhuchar's impoverished, widowed Dina recruits a stoic uncle-nephew duo of tailors, Om and Ishvar, to work for her at home, while a young student of air-conditioning completes the quartet.
It is a society beset by murder and menace. Om, who ends up castrated and Ishvar legless incarnate stoicism, while Dina's Hitlerian brother and entrepreneurial Mrs Gupta represent capitalism's unacceptable face.
Miss Landon-Smith's torpid production has no strategy by which to convey the adaptation's cinematic scope or variety of incident. India, in Sue Mayes's bare, pointless set, is dominated by a blown-up photo of Mrs Gandhi and a wooden platform. When "beautification" police bulldoze slum homes, the sterilisation police arrive in trucks to seize men for castration or riots mark Mrs Gandhi's assassination the production stumbles.
The most glaring defect is the shocking unintelligibility of actors who swallow, slurp and eat about a quarter of their words, as if they have been starved of verbal nourishment.
Until 21 April. Information: 020 7722 9301.
A Fine Balance
Hampstead Theatre
Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage, NW3 3EU
