Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance is a complex, six hundred page long saga about events during the 1975-77 State of Emergency in India. Turning it into a coherent, stageable play is a considerable feat and Anosh Irani has managed that; even if the result is a long evening at the theatre. It’s actually pretty clever. Besides the ruthless elimination of minor characters and sub-plots he handles the principal characters’ back stories by dropping in bits of information all through the narrative that allow the audience to fill in details that are otherwise not made explicit. It’s efficient and effective.
So the story is condensed down to Dina (Zorana Sadiq), a widow, trying to get by by starting a garment sub-contracting business. She hires two tailors; Ishvar (Anand Rajaram) and his nephew Om (Ben Yoganathan), and they together with her PG, Maneck (Siddharth Sharma); the student son of an old friend, carry the plot supported by Husein Mdhavji and Sugoth Varughese playing multiple roles. It’s only as the play proceeds that we learn that Dina is Parsi and the tailors are Scheduled Caste/Dalit. Which is pretty important. There are all sorts of nuances of caste and creed at play here.
The personal stories play out against the background of the Emergency; arbitrary arrests, forced sterilization and various groups and individuals using the power it provides them to pursue other agendas. Religious/class/caste tension is never far from the surface and the most shocking part of the play occurs when the tailors return to their village and become the victims of an official determined to put Dalits in their place. It’s a bit episodic but the various story arcs are pretty well integrated. Given how grim most of the plot is, it’s also surprisingly funny; especially in the first act, which serves to point up just how grim the grim bits are.
A lot of the success as theatre comes from the production and the acting; which is excellent across the board. I was particularly taken by Sadiq’s sympathetic portrayal of Dina but really everyone was excellent. Chris Abraham’s direction is very crisp and keeps thing moving along when they could easily drag. The designs are excellent. Michael Gianfrancesco’s unit set has all kinds of mobile elements which allow it to b transformed almost instantly into many locations; Dina’s flat, the slums, a medical clinic etc. Lighting (Imogen Wilson) and sound (Thomas Ryder Payne) are spectacular to the point of being disturbing but make it possible to portray action convincingly that would be hard to do more explicitly; for example, castration. Ming Wong manages some very clever costuming. making a quadruple amputee credible can’t be easy.
It’s good theatre; everything about it is done well, but it’s not an easy evening. There’s extreme violence, squalour, rather disgusting descriptions of disease and other disturbing elements all layered on a generally pessimistic view of life and it’s three hours long. So, not one to take kids to but plenty to admire.
A Fine Balance runs at Crow’s Theatre until November 7th.
