Meat, alcohol and women: young Gandhi’s struggle to learn and resist
Daniel Nelson Photo: Helen Maybanks
The Overseas Student standing on the stage of the Lyric Hammersmith recalling his three years in London is Gandhi long before the earned the honorific Mahatma.
It’s a titillating idea, drawing on his early experiences (he thought a lift was his room until the doors closed and it started shaking), his striving to fit in with English life, his distress over the lack of vegetarian food, his struggle with sexual temptation.
Playwright Tanika Gupta mines Gandhi’s memoirs, other research and her own imagination to present a fascinating portrait of a painfully shy, eager-to-learn Indian teenager soon to become a lawyer. “He’s basically a sponge – soaking up all the liberal politics of the time,” she told a BBC radio Front Row programme when her short play opened as part of a trilogy, Out West.
It’s fascinating not only because it offers a glimpse of an important historical moment (and because Gandhi is skilfully played by Esh Alladi), but because Gupta suggests the way his excitement and openness contest with his moral rigour. She plays on the audience’s musings about how this innocent in a city of temptations (not so innocent: he’s been married several years and has seen at least some of what living in India can entail) later becomes an extraordinary global figure. You feel the stirrings of this transition occurring before your eyes.
On reflection, though, his later manifestation as the mahatma is not so different from the young man determined to adhere to his mother’s parting strictures against meat, alcohol and women. What changes is his shyness and lack of confidence: he cannot even sufficiently quell those self-perceived deficiencies to meet a prestigious contemporary, London Indian MP Dadabhai Naoroji, though later in life the two men became friends.
Gandhi’s spell in London is bookended - a little too patly - by being told on the outward and homeward journeys to return to the non-European deck, discrimination that that presages his subsequent move to South Africa.
This monologue is too short to have depth. It’s a snapshot, a moment, but like a smartphone snap that becomes live for a few seconds it grabs the attention.
The two other monologues that make up Out West, also zing.
In Blue Water and Cold and Fresh a Londoner explores what it means to be a son, husband and father amidst both subtle and in-your-face racism.
Go, Girl ups the tempo with a story of the moment a young black single mother is suddenly confronted by her teenage daughter’s shocking - but admirable - maturity.
All three playlets are set in west London and their verve and performance provide a compelling reason to get back to the theatre and join them out west.
+ 23 July + 24 July matinee, post-show discussions, free
* Out West is at the Lyric Hammersmith, Lyric Square, Hammersmith, W6 0QL, until 24 July, £15; streamed online 12-17 July. Info: 020 8741 6850 / www.lyric.co.uk