Nic Paul On show in Durban
What becomes of the sons of great men? Greatness seldom strikes the same family twice, and almost never one generation after the next (some South African examples, like the Tutus and the Ruperts come easily to mind here) and it’s an interesting question which Mahatma vs Gandhi doesn’t try to answer, but sort of does, anyway.
Thing is, MK Gandhi’s oldest son Harilal wasn’t great by the most charitable stretch of a particularly forgiving imagination. He arrived in South Africa to join his dad’s Phoenix Ashram having failed his exams in India, spent some time trying to convince Gandhi Snr to send him on a bursary to study for the bar in England, and failing this went back to India in a huff where he failed his matriculation exam twice. He then converted to Islam then back to Hinduism, discovered alcohol and died, perhaps of syphilis six months after his dad, perhaps in a brothel.
These are the dry facts, according to news clippings, biographies of both father and son and a series of letters between the two men. In between are the interesting bits, like Hari’s discovery in a South African prison of the tactic of the hunger strike by which his father would hold India to benign ransom several times in later years. Also that one of Hari’s marginally successful business endeavours, and there were precious few even of these, was importing cloth from England at a time when the great Mahatma was calling for an embargo.
And the several times when Hari invoked the family name to swindle his business associates. On the surface its a sordid and common little story.
Told by Indian playwright Ajit Dalvi after a novel in Gujarati by Dinkar Joshi, and directed by Feroz Khan who also plays the hapless Hari, it’s a magnificent bit of theatre.
Grandly tragic and slyly comic simultaneously, it is universal in its themes and minutely human in the sensitivity of its observations. Although the action takes place in a series of almost stylised tableaux, much like Neigbours, the dialogue is never formulaic or strained, and the individual speeeches never stilted.
Khan, perhaps unsurprisingly for a forty- something man, doesn’t deliver the young Hari that well, but his performance picks up as Hari’s dissolution accelerates. There is little dignity in self-pity, but Khan’s triumph is to salvage what shreds there are of it for Hari, and to paint a human and even likeable protagonist.
Boman Irani as MK Gandhi is a far cry from Ben Kingsley’s greasepainted little saint: he’s a tall and imposing figure who displays little of the humility which Attenborough’s version of the story gave us.
And this version of the man, unsurprisingly, is more interesting. To achieve what Gandhi (the real one) achieved, to take his place as a small brown man amid great white events, MK Gandhi must have had an almost maniacal self- belief and a sometimes delusional sense of mission.
As a white Durbanite, I was reminded during the performance of the cultural wealth the Indian community brings to our city – paradoxically, perhaps more so since the play was imported in part from India, relying little on local talent for the major roles. It was an invigorating reminder of our growing stature as a big port on the Indian Ocean rim, an increasingly interesting bit of real estate. But chiefly, the play was a touching reminder of the universality of human emotion and how it plays itself out.
Mahatma vs Gandhi was welcomed in India as a fresh and necessary take on some tired dogma. It’s a sometimes bitter but effective panacea to Attenborough’s brilliantly researched, beautifully shot but frankly saccharine eulogy. It’s a compelling, historically fascinating and entertaining play, which everyone should see.
Mahatma vs Gandhi is on at the Playhouse Drama Theatre, Durban, until October 4. Tel: 369-9444