Free Outgoing

Synopsis

Just one message. That's all it took for Deepa to be hated by the nation. When a well-behaved Indian girl is filmed with a boy in her classroom, the video clip spreads like a virus. Transmitted from person to person it infects firstly the local community and then seemingly the entire country with a burning moral outrage. Free Outgoing sets the rampant technology of the modern world against the conservatism of a traditional society.

Our Review:

8 July 2008

It is not often that I would like a play to be longer but at 1 hour 15 minutes (a press release promise that gladdens the heart) Free Outgoing feels like short change. Set in contemporary Chennai, Southern India, it tells how the discovery of a teenage girl’s rather too free and outgoing activity, captured on cell phone and ending up on the net, potentially destroys her own life and that of her widowered family and earning her the hatred of a whole country.

Chennai being a conservative Tamil region the huge implications of this disaster become swiftly and painfully apparent even to a Western audience who, at first, giggle at a mother being so unaware of her daughter’s own sexual savvy. When, however, the family are under virtual house arrest, not merely shunned but evicted by their own community and faced with a violent mob, we become not only convinced but compelled by this reality created by writer Anupama Chandrasekhar.

It is not a spoiler to ...

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Latest User Review

David - 20 July 2008:

Theatre is dead. It must be for a play so poor, so melodramatic, so badly directed and poorly cast to get not one but two stagings at the Court. Amateur hour....

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