“Play the game,” Asha’s mum tells her. After the gifted teenager hands in an essay on the politician BR Ambedkar, criticising the thoughts of Gandhi, her mother wants her to keep her head down and focus on getting into university. Inspired by historical revolutionaries and iconoclasts, Asha (Safiyya Ingar) cannot resist pointing out the hypocrisy of big thinkers. But can she apply their ideas to fight injustice in the playground too?
In this compelling coming of age drama, the words of Ambedkar and the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst form the basis of Asha’s political learning. First shown as part of the Orange Tree’s Inside/Outside livestream over lockdown, Sonali Bhattacharyya’s play moves the ideologies from the past into the present. With Asha battling to prove that there are different sides even to history we see as sacred, there is a lot to fit in. The finale may leave threads of these ideas hanging, but the play manages to still feel topical.
