Actresses who are getting on in years repeatedly complain of the paucity of good parts for their age group. They should welcome Last Dance at Dum Dum, since it provides four such roles. The 37-year-old Ayub Khan-Din is one of the ten children of a Pakistani father and English mother. An actor, he turned to playwriting three years ago, and his East is East (which I did not see) won three awards. Now he is back with a second play, in which serious matters are leavened with a good deal of humor.
The time is 1981, and the place is the Calcutta suburb of Dum Dum (where the notoriously lethal dum-dum bullets used to be manufactured). We are in the front garden of a somewhat rundown retreat for elderly members of the dwindling but proud Anglo-Indian community, who take a dim view of both "the natives" and the departed Brits. At present the dwelling is home to a quintet of residents: Bertie Marsh and his wife Muriel, who has an incurable brain tumor; the dotty Violet Wallis, who keeps accumulating imperial portraits; Daphne Willows, who drowns her nostalgia for a French lover in the bottle; and Mr. Jones, who still dresses in black for his long-dead wife.
Serving the household is the native Elliot Mukherjee, a sometime drag queen and Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Beyond the garden wall lives their landlord Mr. Chakravatty, a middle-aged Hindu fundamentalist who thinks even Gandhi insufficiently militant as a role model. To fill the one vacant room, there arrives the English-born widow Lydia Buller-Hughes, against whom there is some animosity although she has lived in India for 35 years, has reluctantly returned to England only once, and loathes "that dreadful Thatcher woman."
Chakravatty, who exerts various kinds of pressure on the tenants, eventually finds the tables turned when it is he who becomes the target of a rampaging group of student rioters. It is Muriel's physical condition that allows her to get away with ranting and railing at others, especially the Hindus. I can conceive of a more impressive Muriel than Madhur Jaffrey, but still we have a splendid group of players here. And they have the advantage of a really superb, jasmine bedecked set by Tim Hatley.
