One goes to the theatre for new experiences, but this left me completely baffled. Written by Aditi Brennan Kapil, and presented as part of a Gate season entitled Who Does She Think She Is?, it deals with the impact of an apparent avatar on the lives of two schoolgirls. But the play seems rootless and never makes clear what transformation the deity has achieved.
The play takes the form of a police interrogation of the schoolgirls as to the whereabouts of their missing companion, Kalki. In a series of flashbacks, we deduce that Kalki was the incarnation of the Hindu god, Vishnu, and led the girls through a series of mildly anarchic adventures. These included shoplifting comic books and jeering at the sexual restraint of a Bollywood movie and accosting boys at a house party. But you are left wondering as to the purpose of Kalki’s visitation. Is she simply meant to be the embodiment of the girls’ secret fantasies? Or is she intended to confirm the Voltairean belief that, if God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him? Whatever the answer, this avatar seems to be more an agent of mischief than a truly life-changing spirit.
Although the play is puzzling and seems to be taking place in a cultural vacuum, it is inventively directed by Alex Brown and nicely acted. Amrita Acharia invests Kalki with a faintly lurid sexual magnetism and predatory danger, Angela Terence and Jordan Loughran do all that is required as the two schoolgirls and Trevor Michael Georges makes the investigating cop a sympathetically bewildered figure.
At one point, Kalki tells us “an avatar’s got to do what an avatar’s got to do”. At the end of this 75-minute piece, I still wasn’t sure precisely what that was.
• Until 31 January. Box office: 020-7229 0706. Venue: Gate, London.
