But as he goes on, it becomes increasingly obvious he's only interested in Gandhi's story inasmuch as it relates to himself; initially a staunch supporter, the more Gandhi is raised from political figure to beloved Father of India, the more disenchanted he becomes with him.
Godse was raised as a girl because of a promise his parents (Ayesha Dharker and Tony Jayawardena) made to a goddess, but as he got older started to question this. Gandhi was the first person to tell him the way he feels about his body is actually the truth (and the way Chandrasekar phrases this scene turns it into a nicely topical nod to trans rights and self-identification.) It makes Godse hero-worship him even more than he already did, but a former friend can become the most dangerous enemy, and Godse's support for Ahimsa is tested when his own friend Mithun (Nadeem Islam) is killed by the British police.
It leads to small-scale local riots, and when Gandhi condemns them and doubles down on Ahimsa to prevent the violence spreading, Godse turns against his former hero, believing he didn't do enough. Instead he and his friend Narayan Apte (Sid Sagar) fall in with Islamophobic politician Vinayak Savarkar (Sagar Arya,) so he starts to see Gandhi's message of inter-faith cooperation as pandering to the enemy. By the time Partition comes along to cause chaos and violence along religious lines, Godse has decided that he must become the saviour of India.
Making it a hat-trick of all the National's stages, Indhu Rubasingham directs confidently on the Olivier*, using it more as an epic backdrop rather than allowing it to overwhelm the production. Rajha Shakiry's earth-toned designs with occasional splashes of colour are dominated by a vast cloth that's either weaving or unravelling, depending on your perspective, while gentle slopes for Gandhi and crowds of followers to majestically stride over slowly revolve. But for all this the storytelling is deceptively simple, with Saraf mostly staying downstage and telling his story directly to the audience.
In fact Saraf has to anchor the entire evening, which he does by charming the audience from the start, only later revealing quite how dark the places he's gone into are. He teases us that we're there for the cheap thrill of spending an evening with a murderer (he prefers that term to "assassin,") and lulls us into a false sense of security: For most of the show he remains likeable, and his descent into something darker is so gradual that only at the end do we really see what he's become, how he's been radicalised, and how he could have radicalised others (if he hadn't been promptly executed.) Even in his final triumphant speech where he still sees himself as the hero of the story, there's something appealing to him that only in the end resolves itself in all-too-familiar hate speech that could have come from any race, nationality or religion.
It comes down to a familiar story from figures like Godse, of a man convinced of his own importance, who instead finds himself apprentice to Ankur Bahl's fussy tailor in some forgotten province (so obscure Savarkar has effectively been banished there to keep him out of trouble) and has to rewrite the story drastically to make himself the hero. The only voice of dissent in his mind is Vimala (Dinita Gohil,) who tries to steer the story back to harsh reality; she's a bit too obvious an attempt to even out the balance in a story dominated by male voices (the script even jokes about her being a minor character he hasn't seen since childhood who has no business interrupting his narration) but Chandrasekhar just about gets away with it.
And in this context the way Rubasingham has staged the show is very clever: It is an epic with a lot of visual flair but, apart from his grand entrance through the stage at the start, most of it is going on behind Godse's back, no matter how much he tells us he's at the heart of the story. It's a mix of the vast and the intimate, that really takes advantage of what this stage can do in something of a counterintuitive way.
The Father and the Assassin by Anupama Chandrasekhar is booking until the 18th of June at the National Theatre's Olivier.
Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
*I know I say this for selfish reasons because she has a higher-than-average hit rate of shows that I've really enjoyed, but when RuNo's done at the National I'd love Rubasingham to take over; but I know she's said she never had ambitions to be an Artistic Director and had to be talked into the Tricycle/Kiln job, so whether she'd actually apply is a different story
No comments:
Post a Comment