Sue Townsend is famous all over Britain and Europe (and even parts of America) as the author of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4, a novel from 1982 about a precocious English schoolboy. For a while Adrian Mole and its sequels were a phenomenon like Harry Potter -- light entertainment about a boy growing up, written by a quick-witted Englishwoman, selling millions of copies -- so it will surprise people who know Townsend through the Mole diaries that she's also an accomplished playwright.
Susan Self
London Calling: Viji Raghunathan, Rachel Rehmet,
and Ruchira Shah find various ways to adapt to their
new country.
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YWCA, 1515 Webster (at 15th Street),
Oakland
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The Great Celestial Cow, Townsend's latest work, follows an immigrant family's slow transition from their farm in India to a new and drearier life in the Southall suburb of London. It opens in 1975 on the farm, where the family's mother, Sita, has learned to fend for herself and her two children while her husband Raj works to save up money in Southall. Now they will all join him. Sita sells the family cow, but refuses, eccentrically, to give up her milking pail, and soon she and the kids are sleeping on the floor of a cold, unfamiliar airport in London, under a mess of blankets, waiting for Raj with a pile of luggage and a bucket. Security guards at the airport have seen it all before. One of them imagines Raj's reaction: "He's had five years of freedom over here, and now his wife and children and a bucket turn up."
Sita has also been free, in a way. Now she has to live under Raj and his fussy, traditional mother and aunt -- two ladies still full of the old rules and superstitions of rural India -- while she acclimates to London and tries to raise her brood. The family puts up with racist shopkeepers and patronizing hippies. Bibi and Prem, the daughter and son, quickly become Westernized. Keenly written sketches of English suburban women, old Indian community leaders, and strange Indian families hoping to marry their sons to Bibi make up a portrait of Sita's everyday emotional tension.
Townsend finished Cow in 1984, two years after Adrian Mole came out, and you could argue that the works share an interest in people going nuts. But Adrian Mole is a neurotic teenager; his craziness is funny and benign and part of his disposition. In the character of Sita, Townsend posits a healthy, strong woman who becomes unhealthily obsessed with cows after years of external strain. From the mood of London, Sita learns to be a headstrong woman, standing up to her narrow-minded in-laws when they try, for example, to keep 13-year-old Bibi out of the kitchen after her first period. ("She'll sour the wine!" one of the ladies cries.) To the abyss of London she eventually gives up her children, who in the end cease to be Indian.
If you were Sita, sure enough, you might say to yourself now and then, "I think I'm going mad!" -- but you wouldn't mean it, and the show's great flaw is that its heroine's final descent feels artificial. As soon as fortune turns on her, the story loses urgency, because Sita is too assertive and smart to slip so easily into victimhood. (Why would she submit calmly to institutionalization -- by her in-laws -- before she loses her mind?) Clive Chafer's normally skillful directing is also a little slack here; not only does an overabundance of between-scene blackouts stutter the action, but the blackouts also come too quickly, as if the lighting guy wants to rush the actors offstage.
Still, the main actors do well, especially Rica Anderson as Sita. She's balanced, cheerful, fierce, and nuanced in every single scene. Rishi Shukla is also potent as Prem, the piping Indian boy who turns into a rather thickheaded London git, and as the Asian Elder, a robed old man complaining about Eastern children losing their heritage in the West. Lauren Grace, Ekow Daniels, and Sandy Schlechter all do excellent work as various British personalities, and Viji Raghunathan is a note-perfect mother-in-law. Amit Garg is solid as Raj, and Ruchira Shah is lively enough, but self-conscious, as Bibi.
TheatreFIRST has been staging a quiet one-company renaissance in Oakland, after a long hiatus: Clive Chafer is reviving not just his troupe but also the flagging theater scene in that part of the Bay Area. The Great Celestial Cow may not be as powerful as last month's Via Dolorosa or last year's The Colour of Justice, but it continues the company's welcome habit of premiering thoughtful plays on racial themes -- usually from England, as Chafer is -- which Americans would otherwise never see.
