Writer: Sonali Bhattacharyya
Director: Milli Bhatia
The greatest stories from the ancient past are the ones that tell us about today. Fables, parables, call them what you will, the tales that get passed down in an oral tradition and then get written down to become part of a faith’s religious texts, survive because of the moral lessons at their heart. Such stories, and whether they have anything to offer the modern world, lie at the heart of Sonali Bhattacharyya’s Chasing Hares.
Save for a framing device at the start and end of the play, Bhattacharyya focuses on life a generation ago in Kolkata. Suffering from a lack of orders, the local clothing factory has shut down, leaving its workers clamouring at the gates. As the factory begins to reopen, workers are selected as needed. It’s a world of zero hours contracts and the gig economy, before either phrase had entered our lexicon.
In this environment, machinist Prab (Irfan Shamji) begins to exercise his penchant for storytelling, extending from making up bedtime stories for his baby daughter to writing for the local jatra theatre company. His idealistic tales, presented as parts of the Mahabharata that history has left out, involve communities working collectively to counteract the greed of the ruling classes – something that irks the theatre company’s leader Devesh (Scott Karin), who just happens to be the scion of the family that owns Prab’s factory.
And thus Bhattacharyya takes us on a journey that encompasses the idealism of stories, and what happens when that collides with the ugly truth of life. Devesh lavishes “company man” Prab and his wife Kajol (Zainab Hasan) with benefits – a huge apartment for the couple, a promotion for Prab – but at a price: they must vacate the flat whenever Devesh needs it to entertain his mistress, while at the factory Prab must become complicit in the abusive work practices that help keep costs down.
Initially at least, Milli Bhatia’s direction struggles to rise the tale to the levels it requires for its own morals to become truly integrated. Shamji and Karin never really feel like they are delivering lived-in characters, in stark contrast to Hasan’s Kajol, who feels natural, relaxed and believable.
They are all eclipsed, however, by Ayesha Dharker as Chellam Dey, the theatre star who stands up to Devesh and persuades Prab to pursue his political ideas in his storytelling. Dharker has such a beguilingly confident light to her performance that Chasing Hares becomes a truly different play whenever she is on stage. Any concerns elsewhere that the dialogue is not capable of coming alive, that what might read well on the page is not coming across to its best effect on stage, fade away in those moments.
The stakes increase in Act II, as Prab finds himself watering down the ideals in his play to placate Devesh, to Chellam’s annoyance: more drastically, the working practices at the factory – which is increasingly hiring child labour because children are cheaper than the experienced workers still clamouring at the gates – have terrible consequences. With no regard for health and safety or occupational welfare, Devesh’s tyranny begins to take hold in ways that mirror the darkest of Prab’s stories.
But just as the fables of old infuse, and are infused by, the politics of Prab’s Kolkata, so too his story infuses our modern world. The play starts and ends with Prab’s grown-up daughter Amba (Saroja-Lily Ratnavel), now living in Leicester, juggling her own new-born baby with life as a delivery driver for a takeaway food company.
The comparisons between her life and that of her father’s are obvious. With no guarantee of income, the workers (all technically “self-employed”, giving them little to no benefits or protections) have to accept conditions that no permanent employee would ever countenance. For their part, the delivery company relies on competition between riders to protect themselves from labour organisation: if one goes down for any reason, there is more work for the others. Like much of the play, the comparisons are not subtly drawn, but that too is in the grand tradition of ancient drama, which often spelled out its moral in ways that guaranteed it would be understood.
But the finale with Amba shows us that Prab’s stories continue to resonate. Chasing Hares reminds us that, however much the ruling classes want to oppress the workers and suppress dissent, they can never kill stories – or what the stories really represent: hope.
Continues until 13 August 2022