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Would a writer of less stature than Sir David Hare have managed to get this over-stuffed behemoth of a play accepted by the National Theatre? Maybe not, but a stage version of ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ kind of needs to be a mess to preserve the essence of the acclaimed non-fiction book it’s adapted from – Katherine Boo’s account of three years spent befriending the inhabitants of Mumbai’s Annawadi slum. Hare’s play is occasionally frustrating, but it’s to his credit that he’s used his heft to get the book staged – just two years after it was published.
And it certainly has the right director. Incoming NT boss Rufus Norris can marshal a spectacle like nobody else, and he and designer Katrina Lindsay fill the enormous Olivier auditorium with a mix of vibrant colour, clanking industrial dread and deafeningly loud projected planes that capture something of the chaos of Annawadi, built on swampy land around Mumbai’s insatiably expanding airport.
‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ is a window onto the lives of India’s poorest, most notably the hardworking Husain family, who make their meagre living sifting through Mumbai’s prodigious accumulation of rubbish. With much gallows humour we’re brought into their messy world of small victories and crushing setbacks, the biggest of which comes when the damaged Fatima (Thusitha Jayasundera) immolates herself in order to frame the Husains. It almost destroys the hardworking family, as they are forced to bribe their way through India’s mind-bogglingly corrupt legal system.
It is a brilliant, horrible and heartbreaking story, painfully small in its scale, but told with epic sweep and flourish by Norris. There’s a particularly fine performance from Meera Syal as Husain matriarch Zehrunisa, a strong woman slowly ground down as she sells everything she owns to fund endless palm greasings.
Were this the only story, ’Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ would be an exceptionally strong play. As it is, the lengthy show heaves with minor characters, subplots and strange, non sequitur-ish scenes. It’s also paced very oddly, meandering like a soap opera, consistently interesting but short on urgency. Filling the stage with motor vehicles, animals and endless crowds of people, Hare and Norris do a fine job immersing us in the world of Annawadi. But it often feels like too much content, not enough shape.
This is not to do down a singular and impressive work. And an important one, perhaps – this vision of the painfully absurd privation faced by the working poor resonates with unequal, over-gentrified, bedroom tax-stricken modern Britain in a way that’s impossible to ignore.