When it comes to taboo-busting, Anupama Chandrasekhar has form. She refashioned Ibsen’s Ghosts into a reflection on the sexual violence in India. Now she finds a paradigm for Hindu nationalism in the man who in 1948 assassinated Gandhi. It’s exhilarating to see such big, bold political history commanding the National Theatre’s largest stage.
Nathuram Godse was born in Maharashtra to parents so traumatised by the deaths of three baby sons that they raised him as a girl to propitiate the goddess who might otherwise take him too. This early emasculation, Chandrasekhar suggests, sent him on a quest for identity and purpose that led him first to Gandhi’s unifying movement of peaceful resistance and then to the divisive politics of Vinayak Savarkar, who built the foundations of Hindu nationalism as a prisoner of the British raj.
We meet Godse as a child who supports his family by channelling the goddess as a village fortune teller, while earning the respect of his peers with his prowess at spitting. On Rajha Shakiry’s rotating stage, elegantly framed by the strings of a weaving loom, the children romp around in scenes that are interleaved with political debates between a darting-eyed Gandhi (Paul Bazely) and a sleek, grounded Nehru (Marc Elliott).
A joke about “that phoney Attenborough film with Sir Ben Kingsley” points to the challenge of squaring up to such well-documented history, but Chandrasekhar does it her way, packing in so much background that at times it seems like an illustrated lecture on the commodities market: first indigo, then cotton and salt. By using a timeframe that darts around, and a focus that zooms in and out from village streets to thousands-strong historic marches, she keeps the drama ticking along.
She is brilliantly served by director Indhu Rubasingham, with a staging that conjures multitudes from 19 actors while making clear that revolutionary politics are backroom affairs, conducted by players whose personal foibles will shape the course of history. While Gandhi capers around, almost childlike in his unworldliness, Sagar Arya’s Savarkar is a chilling figure whose lofty contempt calls forth the latent paranoia in his followers. The insidious power of this tactic is demonstrated in close-up scenes at the tailor’s shop where Godse works, turning the goofy young apprentice into an inquisitor, to the horror of his gentle, camp boss, as all the Muslim clients leave.
The games of Godse and his childhood friend Vimala (Dinita Gohil) develop into a dialectic of political style and content: she is the open-hearted embodiment of Gandhian peaceful protest, he is a small man trying desperately to control the narrative and swat her out of his story.
It needs a powerful actor to hold the centre as Godse, and in Shubham Saraf it gets one. He allows playfulness to billow through his body before resentment starts to corrupt it into a cock-strut of childish vindictiveness and finally into the farcical posturing of a desperado who knows he’s been had, but can’t work out by who, or what to do about it other than to pull the trigger.
This isn’t just a chapter in the sad history of the 20th century, but a story of division and whipped-up animosities that has its roots in colonialism and is repeating itself throughout the world today – not least in the UK’s own grubby politics.
The Father and the Assassin is at the National Theatre, London, until 18 June
