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When the Crows Visit, The Kiln London
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WRITTEN by the award-winning Indian-born playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar, When the Crows Visit is set in India with a theme that takes us straight to the underbelly of that subcontinent’s culture.
The play draws on two main sources — the infamous gang-rape and mutilation of a girl in Delhi in 2012 and the long-held adage that “the sins of the father are visited upon the son” as explored to thrilling effect by Ibsen in his play Ghosts. Ibsen, though, this isn’t.
What is striking about the play is the sense it gives of a terrible, lost society. Not only are the men unexceptionally gross, uncaring and brutal to women but the women, or rather the mothers, collude in the abuse and enable it to continue.
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