Theatre at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web

Dangalnama is a play about the string of riots and bombings that have plagued India since 1984, when large numbers Sikhs were killed in retaliation for the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.

It opens with a montage of photographs of riots and the consequential carnage, including riots in 1984, in 1992 following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the 1993 Mumbai bombs and in 2002 in Gujurat. There is an extraordinary and shocking image of a tiny baby, burnt to a crisp.

It goes on to tell, in an impressionistic, non-linear fashion, the stories and thoughts of various characters, on both sides of the violence: a journalist who resigns following the events, no longer able to cope with the stress or reporting; a man who breaks down in tears as he describes how his wife was pulled from the house and cut to pieces with a sword.

This is powerful stuff. Horrific events are presented with incredible maturity by a young cast. The direction fells fresh. Stories are told in the teller’s native tongue, be it English, Hindi, Gujarati or any of the other Indian languages. Subtitles translate for the audience, a marked difference to Tim Supple’s 2007 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream where the various languages went untranslated. The stories are separated by anguished dance sections.

There is black humour, too. Four victims sit in some form of afterlife, comparing their places and causes of death. The boy sitting on the end of their row has no one to ask – don’t worry, they say, someone will be along very soon. Someone does turn up, and they laughingly ask him “Hindu or Mussalman?!”

Where this production fails, though, is in realising any insight into the motivations and recurrence of these incredibly violent sectarian killings. The cast are young, and stories have emerged from improvisations based on newspapers reports. They can be excused, perhaps, for concentrating on the emotional drama at the expense of questions, but the director should have addressed this.

An attempt is made to make the issue universal, with another montage of photographs at the end. This time the photographs depict “riots” around the world, including images of Buddhist monks made to kneel before Chinese troops in Tibet, and anti-Bush protesters marching in the streets of an unspecified location. The director, though, in trying to rationalize and understand the senseless violence in India, has missed the clear distinction between the two sets of images. The closing montage illustrates anger and demonstration between the state and its populace. Protest is a privilege enjoyed by members of democratic nations. In other, undemocratic countries such protests inevitably invite the heavy-handed attentions of a state keen to control or neuter its people.

The disgusting violence and sheer animal hatred and hostility portrayed in these stories, and evident in many reports from the time, is undeniably an Indian problem. These are crimes of religious intolerance, people fighting against people. The state is rarely involved, except where it is allegedly complicit in the crimes by standing by and allowing them to occur. It has been alleged that in Gujarat in 2002 the state government, led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi, gave orders to the police not to intervene in attacks against Muslims, and possibly even supplied mobs with the specific addresses of Muslims in hundreds of towns and villages.

In no other democracy in the world does such unpredictable slaughter occur so regularly between its own people. The nearest general comparison might be Iraq, a country currently undergoing a civil war and occupation by international forces. It is also a country split in two by religious belief.

For all its good intentions this production is compromised by its blinkered view of the subject matter. It offers no answers or explanations, believing those answers to be external. But the answers to this problem should be at the very heart of this piece. These young actors are intelligent and extremely promising, and they are in danger of heading down a blind alley.

In the Q&A afterwards the actors described their shock at discovering details of the riots from studying newspaper reports, having never read or heard about them previously, or having lacked interest. This stuff is not taught in schools. It is reported with massive bias. This play, or something like it, needs to be staged in India, in every town and village, in every school and university. It needs to play to less sympathetic audiences than those in the West (although I shudder to think of the an audience that may somehow be unsympathetic to these stories of horror and loss).

The director recounts and interesting detail about the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque. It was torn down by Hindu nationalists in 1992, who claimed it had been built on top of a temple to Lord Ram (the god king and hero of the Hindu epic the Ramayana). Inside the mosque, administered by a Hindu priest and respected by local Muslims, was a shrine to Lord Ram. The two religions were hapily coexisting. Then fanaticism, nationalism and politics crept in. Meanwhile, as recent bombings and violence in Jaipur, Rajasthan and throughout West Bengal attest, the communal violence continues.

I saw A Disappearing Number at the Barbican recently. I thought it was visually astonishing, engrossing and immersive. While the plot may be a little too tenuous to hold up all the metaphysical grandstanding, the power of the production is undeniable.

Some keywords I noted instead of writing a proper review: repeating mathematical patterns which go on to infinity, divergent patterns – always moving apart/away from zero, convergent series – two factors always getting closer and closer, but which meet only in infinity, only maths is real – drama, theatre, is all fake, the cambridge professor, real affection for indian mathmetician, he has no proofs, admiration through books, work left behind, chance meeting? Point of maths is to leave something in the world, something concrete.

Also, the Barbican theatre ae both great. wide, comfy seats and a great view from almost anywhere. Don’t be scared of getting the cheap seats.

A Matter of Life and Death at the National Theatre

Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, The Coliseum

Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” is an astonishing musical meditation on the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi. I saw it at the English National Opera at the Coliseum, and it is the best thing I’ve seen there so far.

Glass’s music is mesmerising and hypnotic, though by this I do not mean it is dreamy – it never strays into becoming a soporific. It is dense with seemingly a thousand different melodies, movements and instruments, waves of which glide over and under and into each other. In the latter acts, sudden changes in time signature or key realign the music’s direction at crucial points. Tiny moments, which became huge aspects, of Gandhi’s life, such as the moment he is thrown off a train for daring to sit in first class, are stretched and magnified and performed in exquisite slow motion. Every piece of emotion in these episodes is expressed and felt as the actors chant and sing their way through them, their voices interweaving, at one with the reedy clarinets and flutes.

The staging is endlessly engaging. Reams of newspaper litter the stage, to be variously transformed into the mythic warrior King Arjuna and the charioteer/Krishna from the Hindu text “Bhagavad Gita”, screens for snippets of the opera’s text to be projected onto, and the churning printing presses of Indian opinion themselves. Candlelight, dancing cows made of woven baskets, cellophane gods appear and dissolve as if a part of the music, morphing continuously.

One of the best pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen.