Made in India @ Traverse

Review by Amy Taylor | 23 Feb 2017

Made in India, Satinder Chohan’s new play, directed by Katie Posner, begins in a surrogacy clinic in Gujarat, western India, where rich and professional Londoner, Eva (Gina Issac), is meeting with Doctor Gupta (Syreeta Kumar) and her surrogate, Aditi (Ulrika Krishnamurti), after years of failed IVF treatments. But a simple 'transaction', (as Doctor Gupta informs Eva, she is ”renting a womb”) becomes a race against time as a surrogacy ban for foreigners is introduced just hours before the procedure takes place.

The added pressure of the political disrupting the personal becomes the crucial turning point for the play. An already complicated situation of poor Indian women being used to carry and give birth to the children of foreign couples evokes shades of colonialism. And while the situation for the three characters becomes more fraught, unearthing more moral, ethical and political questions with their arrangement, powerful forces come into play.

Although Chohan never answers these questions, they create a stunningly conflicted tapestry, that each character unravels in turn. The performances are sublime, but it is Krishnamurti, in her role as the first-time surrogate, exploited by both the other characters in different ways, that lingers long after the lights have dimmed.

Although, at points, the play feels like it's tumbling towards a predictable ending,  with inevitable culture clashes and issues of parenthood and just who is the mother of a surrogate baby by law, Chohan manages to hold the audience in complete suspense, navigating the murky waters of surrogacy in contemporary India

Intense and unnerving from the very beginning, Posner’s production is engrossing and thought-provoking, delving into the fraught and conflicting emotions of motherhood, surrogacy and colonialism. [Amy Taylor]

http://www.tamasha.org.uk/made-in-india/