Clemency suggests

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Wasted journey

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Free Outgoing (Royal Court), Fanshen (295 Regent St), Frozen (Riverside)

The Royal Court’s search for new scripts has gone global. Its tireless talent scouts, assisted by the British Council, fan out across France, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Syria and Mexico laying on seminars, workshops and ‘residencies’. They go to India, too, although quite why the Court spends energy nurturing dramatists in a country with the world’s largest film industry isn’t entirely clear. Good Indian writers don’t need foreign aid. Bad ones don’t deserve it.

Free Outgoing by Anupama Chandrasekhar is a harmless slice of Chaucerian parody which has arrived in Sloane Square from Madras. Like a migrant with the wrong papers, it hid in the Theatre Upstairs for a few months before descending on to the main stage with indefinite leave to remain. It’s a daft and threadbare tale, which shows the southern city of Chennai as a parochial creek seething with Victorian prudishness.

When naughty teenager Deepa appears on the internet entangled semi-naked with her boyfriend, moral hysteria grips the community. Deepa’s snobbish divorced mum and her shouty needy brother do their best to deal with the infamy. The plot behaves like a tourist. It doesn’t go anywhere interesting and it takes ages to get there. The most interesting character, Deepa, is left on the sidelines while the others are as predictable as sunset at night-time. There’s the fretful mum, the seismic teenager, the prissy neighbour, the frowning teacher etc.

This underdeveloped piece of whimsy feels like the first draft of a TV comedy drama and because it’s so firmly rooted in India it has nothing to say to Londoners and will only connect with ex-pats from the subcontinent. So the Court has discovered an amazingly complex and laborious way of providing homesick non-doms with a two-hour reminder of the life they’ve chosen to leave.

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