It has been a little while since our last outing to watch a play under the NT Live banner, and it’s probably true to say that a theatre piece set in the slums of Mumbai didn’t immediately get me racing for a seat - the clincher was probably the fact it had been dramatised by David Hare. His play, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, is based on American Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo’s non-fiction work of the same title. Katherine Boo, married to a man with Indian citizenship, spent three years gaining the trust of the people whose lives she sought to record for her book.
She focused on the men, women and children who are forced to live by their wits in Annawadi, a makeshift slum area close to Mumbai airport and its adjacent luxury hotels . It has a large sewage lake lying just beside it, and when you look at photographs of the place it’s hard to believe how the structures, so far from any concept of vertical, can ever stay upright. The people here collect the rubbish discarded by those who live in the other Mumbai with its billionaires and global ambitions. I can’t speak for the book because I haven’t read it, although it is now most certainly on my To Read list.
The play reminded me of the kind of work we were regularly presented with on British TV in the 60s and 70s through slots like Play for Today. Thank God for NT Live and subsidised theatre, because how else could such a large-scale production be possible? TV it seems to me has largely given up its remit of educating its audience in this way. David Hare’s writing is seamless, as was Rufus Norris’s direction - there were times when I actually forgot I was watching a piece of theatre; the set design lighting and production were all top-notch as was the ensemble playing of an excellent British Asian cast. It was unremittingly dark at moments as it depicted the desperate lives of these men, women and children who exist by their wits in this often truly grim place.
As we left the Odeon Tunbridge Wells and drove home in our nice car to our comfortable home we still felt shocked and perhaps a little bit ashamed that such places as Annawadi exist in this world that we are all supposed to share - well, we are, aren’t we?
Definitely worth seeing if you get a chance. There is another NTLive transmission on 2 April, and the last performance of the play is at the National Theatre on 5 May.
As we left the Odeon Tunbridge Wells and drove home in our nice car to our comfortable home we still felt shocked and perhaps a little bit ashamed that such places as Annawadi exist in this world that we are all supposed to share - well, we are, aren’t we?
Definitely worth seeing if you get a chance. There is another NTLive transmission on 2 April, and the last performance of the play is at the National Theatre on 5 May.
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