Historical Plays by Tanika Gupta is Consistently Good

When I review collections, I am sometimes left confuzzled by the conflicting quality of the works presented. For example, Richard Crane’s Russian Plays introduced me to a new favorite (his adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov) and a disaster (Vanity, his take on Eugene Onegin). The Aleph and Other Stories left me torn between Jorge Luis Borges’ frequent misogyny and his occasional brilliance.

However, I am happy to report that Historical Plays, a collection of works by the British-Indian playwright Tanika Gupta, is quite consistent: all the works are good! I would gladly pay $40 to see any of them—National Theatre Live, please take notice—and while no play is truly sublime, I can recommend all of them. Since each play is set in a different historical period, I’ll review each of them in the order they are printed.

The Waiting Room

AKASH: You are a selfish woman…always ashamed of me. Always nagging and scolding. So much and bemoaning your terrible fate. Landed with a thirdrate son. What did you do to deserve it? Karma! Eh? Punished for sins in a past life” (72)

Written and set in 2000, The Waiting Room explores the history of a Bengali-British family after the death of their matriarch. Priya refuses to abandon her husband and children, so it’s up to a friendly spirit in the form of Bollywood idol Dilip Kumar to help her move on. Meanwhile, each member of the family struggles with a different part of her legacy, from her estranged son Akash to her lover Firoz.

Gupta’s deft writing saves her characters from being soppy or wicked; everyone has plenty of room for interpretation, which is fun as heck to act. Priya in particular is a wonderful mess. In her, each viewer will recognize an aspect an aspect of their own mother and love or hate her in turn (Mom, if you’re reading this, I love you).

Great Expectations

MISS HAVISHAM: Already, you have stopped calling me ‘Memsahib’” (182)

This is the way Charles Dickens should have written Great Expectations (I have not read Great Expectations).

The play is an adaptation of Dickens’ classic and while it’s still set in 1861 the cast has been transposed into colonial India. Pip and his family are Indian, Miss Havisham, Jaggers and Herbert Pocket are English, and Magwitch is from the Cape Colony (modern South Africa). Redressing the cast in kurtas and saris might seem tacky at first, but the commentary works. Race adds another dimension to the imperial hierarchy, which tears “ascendant” characters like Pip and Estella apart. And unlike his English counterpart, Pip can only rise so far.

The plot is pretty good to start with, and Gupta doesn’t butcher it or anything. I was never interested in reading Dickens before—my only encounter thus far is a sophomore assignment of A Tale of Two Cities—but this play has convinced me to try something else of his.

The Empress

HARI: It rains a lot. Whole place is covered in thick, thick fog. Their buildings are big and very grand, like the ones in Calcutta. And the people are very strange. They like to look down at us from a great height. Sometimes they can’t even see us” (249)

Like a magnificent steamship The Empress wedges itself into the intersection of Britain and Bengal, romance and tragedy, the great and the ordinary. It juxtaposes the life of Rani Das, a young ayah abandoned on Tilbury docks, and Abdul Karim, who becomes munshi to Queen Victoria. I much preferred the former story, but I could definitely imagine a charismatic actor running away with Karim’s or Victoria’s roles.

Out of the four plays, this one handles 19th-century Britain with the most ambivalence. Almost all of the white characters are complicit in the oppression of Rani and her companions, and the eventually bittersweet ending is a combination of virtue and blind luck. But the story is full of hope, too, personified by young!Gandhi, an idealistic lawyer who also appears in the final play of the collection.

Lions and Tigers

TEGART: The step in India from non-violence to violence is a very short one.

In 2018 Lions and Tigers won the James Tait Black Award, and after reading it I can see why. It’s based on the life of the playwright’s great-uncle Dinesh, who in 1931 was executed for assassinating a British civil servant. Gupta includes her great-uncles’ prison letters in the script alongside speeches from Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Bose, whose competing philosophies coalesce as Dinesh prepares to kill—and eventually, to die.

It would be a lot of fun to stage this play, which is rich with complicated power structures and intimate moments. All of the plays would be fun to stage, because unlike some playwrights—Arthur Miller, I’m looking at you—Gupta grants her characters room to breathe. I could learn a lot from a playwright like her.