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Canberra Today 15°/16° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

When the Raj went home…

[box]THEATRE
“The Dark Side of Midnight”
By Tessa Bremner, directed by Anne Somes for Free Rain Theatre, Courtyard Studio, until November 13. [/box]

WHEN Salman Rushdie wrote about “midnight’s children”, he was thinking about the Indian and Pakistani children born in India at midnight on August 15, 1947, when it was divided into two countries.

Playwright Tessa Bremner was thinking more about the English people who, like her parents, were caught in the middle of this conflict.

Using family letters and diaries, she creates a rip-snorting melodrama that begins in India and ends in Sussex.

You can almost hear the cheers as the virtuous are rewarded and the villain punished.

Bremner fills out her play with accurate and humorous observations about life in the Raj, drawing murmurs of recognition from older audience members.

Lainie Hart, as the young wife Geraldine Lucas, leads an able cast of performers, all of whom make a good fist of portraying English manners.

Hart shows us the conflicts experienced by a kind-hearted young woman eager to know more about an unfamiliar country and its people.

The racism she encounters returns to haunt her years later in Enoch Powell’s 1967 England.

In both places, her views are balanced by her less-susceptible sister, played forthrightly by Andrea Close.

Eliza Bell has the lion’s share of laughs as the upper-crust Mrs Coke-Symonds and later the English servant Edie.

Josh Wiseman doubles effectively as Geraldine’s husband and an ancient survivor of the Raj, Bertie. Brian Kavanagh is consistently unnerving as the villain.

Director Anne Somes sets a cracking pace that makes for an entertaining evening with serious undertones.

This is an impressive new play from Bremner, and should travel further afield.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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