Mother Teresa Is Dead ( Archived )

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(L to R) Maxine Peake, Harry Dillon; Diana Quick, Harry Dillon; Harry Dillon

Direction: Simon Usher, Design: Antony Lamble, Lighting Design: Paul Russell, Sound Design: Ian Dickinson

Cast: Harry Dillon, John Marquez, Maxine Peake, Diana Quick

‘Where would writers be without the British and Indian scenario? From Kipling and Foster to Paul Scott and Stoppard, it is a subject that exerts a peculiarly potent allure. The latest to climb aboard the sub-continental bandwagon is Helen Edmundson, best known for her excellent dramatic adaptations of great works of literature ranging from The Mill on the Floss to Anna Karenina and War and Peace.

‘Her new play is set in a village near present-day Madras, and among much else, offers a persuasive description of why writers are so drawn to Indian subject-matter. India does strange things to people, observes Srinivas, a handsome, Oxford-educated Indian who runs a refuge for street kids. Its clich but its true. It can leave your soul completely exposed. One need hardly add that exposed souls are the stuff of great literature.

‘The action begins with the arrival of Mark, sweaty, angry and confused, the typical Englishman abroad, in fact. He has come to find his wife, Jane, who suddenly abandoned her husband and five-year-old son in their Kensal Rise flat and fled to India. She is now living with Frances, a middle-aged English artist, and has been helping Srinivas in the refuge, until mysteriously doing a runner from there too, subsequently being discovered weeping in a public square and claiming that she has a dead baby inside a plastic carrier bag from which she wont be separated.

‘One is immediately gripped by the dramatic situation, and the skill with which Edmundson draws her characters. Mark (John Marquez), for instance, initially seems deeply unattractive typically thuggish, low-rent Brit, who regards foreigners with deep suspicion and shouts when he doesnt get his own way. Yet gradually Marquez lays bare his characters pitiful confusion and emotional neediness, and you come to care for him.

‘In contrast, Srinivas (Harry Dillon) seems a right charmer – intelligent, whitty, totally committed to selfless, charitable work. Yet is he nearly as attractive as he seems? His contempt for Mark lacks any hint of charity, while his treatment of the deeply disturbed Jane seems arrogantly manipulative, if not downright sinister.

‘What the play powerfully captures in the guilty terror that must sometimes overwhelm all thinking, feeling Westerners when they consider the grotesque privilege of their lives – a privilege that does little to make us happy. Caught in a claustrophobic marriage filled with anger and anxiety, Jane felt an overpowering need “to get down on my knees and help someone who couldn’t help themselves”. And in a shocking courageous speech, she argues that “we exaggerate our feelings for our kids. We use them as an excuse not to live properly.” By concentrating so obsessively on the family unit, the play suggests, we blind ourselves to the horrors and injustice of the world beyond.

‘It’s a big, fascinating theme, in a play that contemplates the dismaying spiritual sickness of the West while asking hard questions about the way we ought to live.

“Mother Teresa is Dead is a tough and moving drama, and one that nags away at the conscience long after you have left the theatre.’

The Daily Telegraph

‘As in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, an Englishwoman has abandoned her family to work in the developing world; the crucial difference here is that we get to hear all the arguments for and against. Jane has left her husband and five-year-old son in Kensal Rise to work for a shelter for street kids in Madras. But she has undergone some for m of crisis and is now being looked after by an expatriate woman painter. Husband Mark comes in pursuit of her. What follows is a fierce contest between the claims of home and those of the children’s centre as represented by its suavely articulate founder, Srinivas.

‘Edmundson’s aim is clear: to show Jane as a confused idealist caught between two equally importunate masculine demands. And we are obviously meant to feel that Srinivas, who makes a mild pass at her, is a careerist charity-worker as suspect, in his way, as the working-class Mark. But for me it is no real contest. Everything Mark says – including “everyone should just stay in their own countries” – reveals him to be a bullying, racist bigot. Whereas Srinivas, for all that he is a professional charmer, makes the perfectly practical suggestion that Jane should act on her instincts and settle in India with her son.

‘The play poses a valid and increasingly urgent question: what does a woman who detests the western rat race and cares deeply about child poverty actually do? But having set up the debate, Edmundson muddies it by suggesting that woman remain perrennial victims of male imperatives. She compounds the point by showing the painter, Frances, to be a solitary exile who has piad a heavy price for abandoning her faithless husband. What angers me is Edmundson’s implicit defeatism and her reversal of all the arguments on behalf of individual freedom offered by Ibsen over a century ago in A Doll’s House.

‘It takes a good play, however, to get under one’s skin as this one did under mine. there is fine work from Maxine Peake as the emotionally torn Jane, Harry Dillon as the supercilious Srinivas and the peerlessly beautiful Diana quick as the exiled Frances in Simon Usher’s atmospheric production. Edmundson has written a play that asks all the right questions. I only wish it came up with a different more positive answer.’

The Guardian