When the Crows Visit

by Anupama Chandrasekhar

seen at the Kiln Theatre on 13 November 2019

Indhu Rubasingham directs this new play, with Ayesha Dharker as Hema, Bally Gill as her son Akshar, and Soni Razdan as her mother-in-law Jaya. Clearly inspired by Ibsen's Ghosts the play provides (if that were possible) an even more bleak view of family dynamics. Where in Ibsen's play young Osvald Avling is for the most part a victim of circumstances, destroyed both mentally and physically by the ghosts surrounding him, in this play Akshay, the son of the house, perpetuates the cycle of male violence endemic in the family. 

The brutal compromises forced on women in a society in which men dominate and divorce is unthinkable even in the face of physical violence lie behind the constant bickering and unease between Hema, widowed now but still reliant on her husband's reputation to protect the family name, and Jaya, an apparently indulgent and borderline senile woman who uses her frailty to shield herself from her own painful memories. Relying on mythic archetypes to justify her past actions, and hoping that they will still guide her in dealing with her grandson, Jaya is a woman barely able to recognise that she has colluded in her own misery. Hema, realising that her son has become a monster too like his father, perhaps is on the verge of breaking the pattern - but at this point the play stops, so we cannot know if she is successful. In the meantime Akshay has degenerated from a somewhat rootless and none-too-successful young man in the big city, to a quite repellently vicious level. Just a quirky twist of the mouth can turn a naive smile to a cynical sneer with quite chilling effect.

The play is somewhat heavy in symbolism, with much made of the crows Jaya feeds, and of her reliance on religious pieties. Since the traditions are not mine, I cannot judge whether they are deftly or fairly handled, but they certainly add to the sense of doom which accelerates throughout the piece. The details of a sexual attack on a young woman in the city, in which Akshay is implicated, are graphic, and the final scene during which Jaya's carer is attacked off-stage, is harrowing: reviews I have read have criticised these elements of the play, but unfortunately keeping quiet about these things is exactly what the perpetrators need in order not to be challenged.

It's very disquieting, but neither salacious nor voyeuristic. The tensions within the family have been long simmering, and our awareness of them by the end of the play allows for no hiding and for no glossing them as merely a private matter. Interestingly, in an audience including many of Indian origin, one of the most audible gasps came when the anguished Akshar shouted an obscenity at his mother. The actions of the deceased father, admittedly only referred to rather than dramatised, were taken on board in a more muted way.