Straight from The Royal Court, Anupama Chandrasekhars poignant drama about the impact of one girls sex life on the rest of India cant help but provoke.
Fifteen-year-old Deepas headmistress arrives at the house to inform Malini, Deepas mother, that her daughter has been suspended for being intimate with a boy named Jeevan. At first, Malini refuses to listen to such accusations against her model child and blames the boy, his father, the school and technology in general. However, when the extent of Deepas intimacy is revealed as an MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) video recording and later broadcast on the internet, the delicate euphemisms Deepas family have been using are replaced with words like slut and whore. Friends desert them, the media camps on their doorstep and, despite Malinis best efforts at denial, the whole familys lives begin to crumble. Deepa, the girl responsible for the mess, never appears onstage and, as such, can be known only to the audience, as to the rest of India, as the infamous MMS girl.
Lolita Chakrabarti plays the desperate Malini with powerful conviction and impressive energy, and Amit Shah is quite exceptional as Sharan, Deepas protective brother who finds himself unfairly punished for his sisters sins. Chandrasekhars script is sensitively balanced, distilling the more sober scenes with moments of charming humour. However, set in just one room, charting the developments of the outside world from within, the production crawls slightly and craves a little more action onstage rather than off.
