Theatre review: When the Crows Visit

If the last few years have seen a cultural shift towards highlighting the harassment and abuse women have been routinely suffering around the world, Indian playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar has some particularly brutal truths to speak to her own country, and horrors she sees as having been silently passed down the generations. She takes inspiration - very loosely - from Ibsen's tale of the sins of the father being visited on the son, Ghosts, for her own story of a son returning home with a terrible secret, When the Crows Visit. Widow Hema (Ayesha Dharker) lives in the home she inherited from a husband so violently abusive she's considered lucky to have survived him. The seven years since his death have been a kind of liberation for her but she still has a constant reminder in her mother-in-law Jaya (Soni Razdan) who still lives with her, along with her young carer Ragini (Aryana Ramkhalawon.)

Theatre review: The Funeral Director

I try to catch the Papatango playwrighting award winner every year, and this year's offering doesn't lack for ambition in its subject matter: Iman Qureshi's The Funeral Director takes on the line where different marginalised groups' human rights clash. Ayesha (Aryana Ramkhalawon) and her husband Zeyd (Maanuv Thiara) run a funeral home specialising in Muslim funerals in "a small divided town in the Midlands." Married for five years they seem to be ticking along with their lives well enough but clearly aren't actually happy - Zeyd is just about comfortable enough to confront the fact that his wife is completely uninterested in sex, but she always dodges the conversation. An unexpected crisis comes to their lives in the form of Tom (Tom Morley,) who comes into the funeral parlour in a state of shock after his Muslim boyfriend dies of an overdose that may or may not have been suicide.