2 - The Setting: The Constructed/Deconstructed Family

Summary

I am practicing theatre in an extremely imperfect world where the politics of doing theatre in English looms large over anything else one does. Where writing about the middle class is seen as unfashionable... I am certain that my plays are a true reflection of my time, place and socio-economic background… in a country that has a myriad challenges to face politically, socially, artistically and culturally.

(Dattani, 2000: xiv)

Dattani here maps the context of his work. The setting for all of Dattani's plays then, is necessarily embedded within the mechanisms of the middle class Indian family, and this is the context from which he operates. Working within his own time and place, and not an alien and distant westernized world, removed from the everyday ground realities with which the urban Indian audience could easily identify, Dattani was already set on a path very different from earlier attempts at staging Indian drama in English. “In drama, one explores the distortions of everyday speech, the weight and flow of everyday movement, nd endeavours to bring to them a sense of music”, says Dattani (Maheshwari, 2001). And this reverberates in the everyday, normally spoken English idiom that comes so naturally to him.

Dattani's early plays especially concern themselves with the apparatus of the amily that is entrenched within the middle class milieu–of which the playwright self-admittedly is a part – and would attempt to ‘connect’ with audiences drawn from similar backgrounds.

His characters situate themselves firmly within the family (and the society) in specific milieus and probe into the nature of their settings.