✭✭✭✭✩

by Anosh Irani, directed by Chris Abraham

Crow’s Theatre, Crow’s Theatre, 341 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto

September 9–October 25, 2026

Dina: “Perhaps I was foolish to hope”

The 2026/27 theatre season in Toronto has opened with the world premiere of Anosh Irani’s stage adaption of A Fine Balance, the prize-winning novel from 1995 by Rohinton Mistry. It’s an adaptation that can be enjoyed for stunning stagecraft and impassioned acting alone. In terms of storytelling, however, Irani is more content to show us events rather than to provide the background for why they are happening. This is likely the result of attempting to present the complex story of a 736-page novel in less than three-hours.

The action takes place in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1975. Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash, known as Om, have left their village in response to an advertisement for two tailors placed by the widow Dina Dalal. On the train into the city, they meet the young man, Maneck, who is also on his way to Dina’s flat where he plans to stay as a paying guest while he studies for a college certificate. His connection is that his mother was Dina’s best friend. It happens that all four of these characters are Parsis, descendants of Zoroastrians who fled to India in the 7th century to avoid persecution in Persia.

Act 1 is taken up entirely with depicting the changing relationships of these four characters. Dina is initially sceptical of the two tailors until she sees that they are hard workers and do good work. Om, however, wonders what kind of business Dina is running. Who gives her the patterns and fabric and who is she working for? Meanwhile, Om and Maneck become friends. The stable life of all four is periodically threatened by a rent collector who accuses Dina of running a business out of her flat, a fact she denies. Interspersed with scenes at Dina’s are scenes of Ishvar and Om attempting to get used to living in a slum.

The main question that underlies the action in Act 1 is why Ishvar and Om have come to Bombay. They tell Dina that they have come to earn enough money so that they can buy a bride for Om. Eventually, their secret comes out. They are Dalits, otherwise known as untouchables, so low they are not even part of India’s official caste system. More than that, in their village an upper-caste villain killed Ishvar’s brother and his entire family. Ishvar and Om were the only two family-members to escape.

Irani allows Act 1 to end without having built any tension or sources of conflict that could evolve into drama. Act 2, however, consists of one catastrophe after another for the four main characters, only one of which was anticipated in Act 1. What is signally missing is a background that would help understand how these disasters come about. In Act 1 Irani gave us some background for Ishvar and Om. In Act 2 he finally gives us some insight into Dina’s past. Even by the end of the play, though, we know virtually nothing about Maneck’s past that would help explain his actions.

Someone who had not read Mistry’s novel could leave the Irani’s adaptation thinking that terrible things just happen in a place like India. That would be a mistake. Irani, following Mistry, has deliberately set the action in 1975. The problem is that Irani never explains why that date is so significant. All David Staines’s note tells us in the programme is that “The quartet come together soon after the government declares a ‘State of Internal Emergency’, lasting twenty months and providing the novel’s nightmarish background”. The Emergency, as it is known in India, is not merely a background but a force that has direct bearing on the lives of the characters.

The Emergency was a period of 21 months beginning June 25, 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi assumed authoritarian powers, cancelled elections and suspended civil liberties. This had the effect of reinforcing upper-caste power and legitimizing right-wing organizations while suppressing lower-caste protest. Directly affecting the characters of the play, the Emergency permitted drastic measures such as forced sterilization and slum clearance which disproportionately — Dalits and lower-caste people.

A Fine Balance was first adapted for the stage in stage in England in 2006 by Sudha Bhuchar and Kristine Landon-Smith. The production at the Hampstead Theatre featured a large portrait of Indira Gandhi placed as if she oversaw the action. In contrast, Michael Gianfrancesco’s set features a row of the kind of advertisements one sees in an Indian train station. Irani has deliberately set the focus of his adaption on the dynamics among the four central characters and placed political references to the side. We hear about protests and people speak of the “Prime Minister, she said”, but the political ramifications of the story, and indeed why Mistry has set it in 1975, are almost totally missing. Gone, too, is the point that Mistry’s novel in an indictment of authoritarianism, a point that would have had particular resonance today when so many governments are turning in that direction.

Irani’s adaption succeeds because director Chris Abraham has drawn such nuanced performances from the entire cast. In fact, Zorana Sadiq and Anand Rajaram both give career-best performances — she as Dina and he as Ishvar. Sadiq is simply marvellous at conveying the multiple trains of thought behind Dina’s every speech and action. Quite often she manages to play Dina as hopeful and fearful or annoyed and amused all at once. It is a pleasure to watch Sadiq show us how Dina gradually alters her impression of Ishvar and his nephew from suspicion to grudging admiration to deep caring. Irani waits till Act 2 to give us any of Dina’s background. We see that a complex story has led to Dina’s present actions and it would have been wonderful to see Sadiq act it out.

Anand Rajaram is best known for his comic performances and his portrayal of Ishvar is a memorable one. Rajaram draws out all the comedy of Ishvar’s over-submissiveness toward Dina while sharply criticizing Om for mocking his behaviour. Rajaram shows Ishvar as aghast and yet resigned when Ishvar sees how ghastly life will be living in a slum. Yet, what makes Rajaram’s performance great is when Ishvar become a victim of increasing levels of physical aggression. For all the worldly advice Ishvar gives to Om, we see that Ishvar is himself an innocent, someone who has escaped the horrors of his village but is completely unaware that they still persist there and in the city.

Ben Yoganathan gives a fine performance as Om. Yoganathan makes it clear during Om’s prolonged silence at the start of the play that Om is not quiet out of shyness but of out of anger at his plan and discomfort at life in the city. It is a pleasure to see Om’s real personality when away from Dina’s watchful eye. He would like to swagger and enjoy his freedom, even if his present situation makes that impossible.

Of the central four characters, Irani reveals most about Ishvar and Om, their past and their hopes for the future. Therefore, it is exceedingly strange that he lets us know so little about Maneck, the son of Dina’s best friend, who is her paying lodger. Siddharth Sharma plays Maneck as a thoroughly likeable young man who, for reasons that Irani does not reveal, is plagued with unhappiness and fear. Sharma is excellent at conveying this agitated side to Maneck, sometimes but not always hidden beneath a surface normality. But it is extremely frustrating that Irani never lets us know enough about Maneck to help us understand his actions.

Sugith Varughese and Husein Madhavji both play a wide range of characters. Varughese excels as both the jocular man who introduces Ishvar and Om to the embarrassing practices of the slum and the frightening upper-caste thug, Thakur Dharamsi, an incarnation of evil, who now rules over Ishvar and Om’s village. Madhavji well plays both Shankar, a legless, handless beggar, who is incongruously content with life and Nusswan, Dina’s older brother, who is great at expatiating upon his own life but unwilling to listen to Dina or learn of her need.

The physical production is the most elaborate seen at Crow’s Theatre since The Great Comet in 2023. Michael Gianfrancesco has designed an extraordinarily detailed set representing a slice of Dina’s apartment, where we see her closed-in verandah, her combined living room, kitchen and dining room and her bedroom that she turns into the workroom for Ishvar and Om, plus a space outside the front door so that we can see and appraise characters before they enter. In a brilliant move, Gianfrancesco has set elements hung on two overhead rails in front of the set for scenes not set in the apartment — one representing Dina’s front door head-on where characters debate before entering, one a section of the corrugated tin wall of a slum dwelling. The set is beautifully lit by Imogen Wilson to signal mood and times of the day, although her blinding the audience for set changes is probably unnecessary.

Those familiar with the novel will likely want to see their favourite characters on stage. Those unfamiliar with it will see an initially amusing but ultimately deeply depressing play, frustrating in not helping us enough to understand what happens to its characters and why. Both groups will likely feel that the high calibre of the acting, design and direction make for an impressive evening of theatre even if not of storytelling.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Ben Yoganathan as Om, Zorana Sadiq as Dina and Anand Rajaram as Ishvar; Sugith Varughese (facing back), Anand Rajaram as Ishvar, Siddharth Sharma as Maleck and Ben Yoganathan as Om; Zorana Sadiq as Dina; Ben Yoganathan as Ishvar and Anand Rajaram as Om. © 2026 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.crowstheatre.com.