✭✭✩✩✩

written by Radha S. Menon, directed by Sasha Kovacs

Red Betty Theatre, Next Stage Festival, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto

January 5-15, 2012

The Washing Machine asks to be taken seriously, but its subject matter and style are so clichéd and overwrought that that is almost impossible.  Radha S. Menon has taken the theme found in Western fiction and film that could be called “white woman goes crazy in the mysterious East”.  We find this theme in such fiction and film as The Letter (1940 based on Somerset Maugham) and Black Narcissus (1947 based on Rumer Godden) and in as recent a play as Helen’s Necklace (2001) by Carole Fréchette.  Menon’s play in so full of overheated language and situations that it could be staged word for word as a comic send-up of the theme.  But, unfortunately, that’s not what she intends.

The story The Washing Machine most closely resembles is The Towers of Silence (1971), the third novel of Paul Scott’s tetralogy The Raj Quartet with Menon’s central character Isabelle very like Scott’s character Mildred Layton.  Both are wives, now alone, of high-status Englishmen in India who plan to build a tennis court that will destroy a piece of land with symbolic value.  In Menon’s play, set in the 1978 instead of the 1940s, the wife’s husband is not a prisoner of war but has died, lucicrously, in a traffic accident having just imitated Robert De Niro in the movie Taxi Driver. 

Having grown up in India and known nothing else except for her married life away, Isabelle (Cyndy Penner) returns to the family estate Chez Nous near Bangalore as the only home she knows.  There she immediately makes a pest of herself by treating the servants badly and hatching two plans that go directly counter to Hindu beliefs.  First, although she claims to be happy to be back, she can’t stand the ravages to her banana plantation by the monkeys living at the convent next door or the noise made by the family dog in response.  She wants the dog put down and the monkeys culled.  To Hindus monkeys are sacred.  Having achieved her first plan she moves on to the second, more serious maimouphobic scheme--building tennis courts on her property which will necessitate knocking down an ancient shrine to the monkey-god Hanuman. 

Isabelle, who speaks as if she were living in the 19th, not the 20th century, longs for the good old days of the Raj, but it’s hard to see how that’s possible.  If the play is set in the 1978 as the director’s notes claim, Isabelle could have experienced at most ten years of the Raj which ended in 1948 if she is 30, or twenty years if she is 40.  It’s hard to tell which age Penner is aiming at, but if the latter is true it is impossible to see why Isabelle would be so rude to the old servants she has deliberately returned to, be surprised by the monkey problem or not know how offended Hindus would be by knocking down the shrine.  She acts like a newcomer to the subcontinent, not someone who grew up there. 

Yet this is not the worst inconsistency.  Menon has the action pointlessly observed by the ghost of Isabelle’s mother (Mina Jacobs), who is silent for the first half of the play.  Menon has the ghost act shocked that Isabelle is carrying on an affair with the plantation master James (Aparajit Bhattarcharjee), who is also her brother.  How could Isabelle’s mother not know who James is?  James is the product of Isabelle’s father’s affair with the washerwoman, a “dalit” or untouchable and grew up with Isabelle.  Dalits were viewed as dirty and could spread their contamination merely by having their shadow fall on a non-dalit caste member.  Isabelle, therefore, as far as the Hindus are concerns, is fully polluted.  This makes the big revelation at the show’s conclusion (spoiler alert!) that Isabelle is also a dalit, no revelation at all.

There is virtually no plot.  Isabelle makes outrageous plans.  The servants object.  James threatens the servants.  The servants speak about the bad karma Isabelle is bringing on herself. The cycle repeats several times.  Isabelle’s ghostly mother spends most of her time drinking tea in the afterlife, but suddenly Menon has an Aghori ascetic (Dipal Patel) rush on stage muttering and stamping his staff.  Sometimes those on stage notice him, sometimes not.  Eventually, we discover that he has come to compel Isabelle’s mother to return from limbo to break up the relationship between Isabelle and James.  Nothing comes of this, unsurprisingly since the idea of supernatural intervention has occurred to the Aghoti and to Menon too late after things have already gone too far between the siblings.

The washing machine of the title is supposed to be the prime symbol of the play representing how Isabelle wants to wipe out the past with modernity--but cannot.  As it happens, Menon has overwhelmed the play with so many other symbols, especially monkeys, that the washing machine loses whatever import it was supposed to have. 

The main mystery in The Washing Machine is how such a poorly written, bizarrely old-fashioned play ever made it into the Next Stage Festival.  How did actors as fine as Steve Cumyn (as a Catholic priest who begins to go native) and Ronica Sajnani (as Ayah, the wise family housekeeper) consent to appear in such a weak vehicle? 

The best feature of the production is Jung-Hye Kim design.  The wooden circle that dips over the stage signifies not just the earthly plane of action but also the cycles of birth and rebirth the servants speak so much of and, I suppose, just to emphasize the bathos of the image, the circular door and cycles of the washing machine.         

What Menon could have benefitted from most is watching any of the plays by Anusree Roy about the caste system in India, especially Pyaasa (2007).  There she would have seen how utter simplicity of style and presentation is so much more powerful than verbosity and outdated literary models.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Cyndy Penner (facing forward) and Ronica Sajnani. ©2012 Red Betty Theatre.

For Tickets, visit www.fringetoronto.com.