Chasing Hares. Young Vic.

Chasing Hares is a timely exploration of worker exploitation that looks nice and boasts some good ideas. If only the execution were better.

25 July 2022 Press Night

As a reflection on the power of storytelling to change lives the Young Vic’s ambitious production of Sonali Bhattacharyya’s Chasing Hares never fulfils its promise. That is a shame, because there are some good ideas bubbling around in the writing. What lets it down is some pretty clunky implementation.

Set mainly in West Bengal in the early 2000s, the narrative concerns itself with protagonist Prab (Irfan Shamji), a former student politician, born storyteller, and fighter for workers’ rights.

Prab has a degree in Bengali cultural studies and an enduring interest in Jatra, a type of Bengali Folk Theatre. But with wife Kajol (Zainab Hasan) and infant daughter Amba to support, the erstwhile activist soon finds himself competing against other desperate and downtrodden workers for piecework at the local gangster-owned textile factory.

Scion of the factory-owning Narg dynasty, bad-boy, philanderer and factory manager Devish (Scott Karim) also has an interest in Jatra. He is a part-time performer who, alongside on-off girlfriend and co-star Chellam (Ayesha Dharker), puts on Jatra shows for the very workers his factory is exploiting.

The show’s awkward conceit that protagonist and antagonist both share an interest in Bengali folk theatre requires quite some suspension of disbelief, particularly as the latter is such an archetypal dumb thug. But for the sake of the neatly symmetrical plot, swallow our doubts we must.

With an eye on impressing his factory manager boss, Prab and Kajol engineer a post-Jatra backstage encounter with Devish. It turns out that bad-boy Devish is looking for some fresh new stories to liven up his shows, and muses Chellam, who better to write them than Prab.

Prab and Chellam initially team up to subvert Devlish by lacing the new stories with a pollical message designed to subtly subvert his power, and so encourage a sense of rebelliousness and political awakening among the factory’s oppressed employees. Devlish who, according to Chellam, “wouldn’t know an allegory if it fucked him in the ear,” is duly fooled. The emblematic tale of a group of downtrodden animals escaping from the clutches of a local landowner to find freedom in a suspiciously communist-sounding nirvana soon takes shape.

But, in a nifty turning point, the Nargs land a massive textile contract and choose Prab to manage it, chucking in a new flat and massive pay rise to boot. All he has to do to earn the promotion is tone down the Jatra allegory and turn a blind eye to children working in the factory.

It is a nice set up which reaches a crisis point when an exhausted child labourer gets appallingly injured. Does the erstwhile activist remain true to his values or let himself become seduced by the fruits of capitalism?

Unfortunately, things collapse in the under-written and confusing second half. The Jatra storyline is never quite resolved and the metatheatrical potential of a play within a play is sorely under-developed.

Worse, Bhattacharyya tops and tails the play with scenes involving food delivery workers in an unnamed UK city. The idea I suppose is to draw parallels between worker oppression in West Bengal and the UK. The problem here is the comparison does not convince – whatever their trials and tribulation delivery workers are not abused children, and the idea they are entirely oppressed denies them any agency in choosing the kind of work they want to do.

Another gripe. Director Milli Bhatia has her cast present themselves on stage at the beginning of the play for a round of applause. Who knows why? Perhaps she is worried they will not get enough at the end, although this seems curiously lacking in confidence. Perhaps she is foregrounding a characteristic of Jatra theatre. Or perhaps the cast just needed of bit of loving that day. Whatever the reason, I hope it does not catch on.

Overall Chasing Hares does not convince.

Writer Sonali Bhattacharyya

Director Milli Bhatia

Designer Moi Tran

Lighting Designer Jai Morjaria

Cast

Chellam Ayesha Dharker

Kajol Zainab Hasan

Devish Scott Karim

Amba Saroja-Lily Ratnavel

Prab Irfan Shamji

Duration: 2 hours 5 mins. One interval.

Full Disclosure: Ticket from Central Tickets.