The migration of the call centre from the backwaters of Britain and the US to the towns of India is one of the stranger outcomes of globalisation. For customers, it can make little difference whether the person on the end of the phone is in Bognor or Bangalore. For the Indian workers, however, the experience is odd - and Alladeen is at its best when showing just how odd.
We watch a group of call-centre inductees learning how to "neutralise the mother tongue" and speak slowly in vaguely American accents. They adopt the names of characters from Friends, familiarise themselves with American football and abandon their personal lives to work from 3am until noon. Stage action melds with fascinating video vox pops from real-life phone operators: one, Aarti Angelo, talks sagely of how, in the wake of September 11, it has been crucial that workers hide their Asian, particularly Muslim, identities from sensitive American callers.
This is all thoroughly absorbing, which is perhaps why the surrounding production, directed by Marianne Weems of New York's Building Association, and designed by London's Motiroti, feels so misguided. Where it might build up the characters and narratives of the Bangalore workers, Alladeen wastes its energies on linking their stories with that of Aladdin, the poor boy who wished himself new. The results are largely risible: the visa card, for instance, is presented as the evil magician of the modern world, luring us into destruction. This isn't theatre: this is mollycoddling.
The Bangalore section is bookended by scenes in New York and London, in which a rich jetsetter floats aimlessly, chatting to friends across the globe on her mobile phone. To suggest that modern technology has brought us closer together and yet isolated us is a simplistic point; that the girl has no sense of identity, beyond those she adopts in karaoke bars, is a potentially engrossing storyline presented in a dispiritingly tacky way.
Theatre, of course, is full of Aladdins: of people transforming themselves and fulfilling secret wishes. So it's strange that this modern update of the story feels so unsuited to the stage. The show is technologically impressive: the design, by Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi, is dominated by a giant screen on which ugly computergenerated images interchange with live and prerecorded video. But when you add an intrusive bleepy soundtrack by Shri and a few bland moralisms, the whole thing looks like a TV documentary transported to an alien land.
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