After 70 years of independence, how far has India liberated itself from its colonial past? Taking its title from a sign over the door of an all-whites club in Bengal in the 1930s, Siddhartha Bose’s ambitious but rambling and often fumbling play considers the ghosts of colonialism, and how oppressors can lurk in a nation’s psyche and shape its future long after they have left.
In present-day Mumbai, Ananda (Omar Khan), who has returned home from England for his father’s funeral, snorts coke with friends celebrating the materialism of the new India. A generation earlier, in the 1970s, Ananda’s father, Shyamal, fritters away his life in drunken regret for the Rhodes scholarship he so narrowly missed out on, which would have taken him to London. He’s so in thrall to all things English that he alienates his patient wife (Archana Ramaswamy). Skipping back to 1932, Rani (Komal Amin) becomes a member of the Indian Republican Army and dreams of the moment she will help the country “awaken”.
These disparate strands offer a shifting meditation on the value of remembering and forgetting, some detours into gender politics that rather suggest most Indian men are overgrown babies, and some history lessons (the teaching of English literature apparently originated in India). But despite the sterling efforts of a cast playing multiple characters the writing is unfocused, the plotting baggy and the staging perfunctory. It’s certainly epic, unfortunately never in a good way.
