Free Outgoing

The future’s bright: the future’s Orange. Connecting people. SMS. MMS. LOL. The mobile phone is only a quarter of a century old, but in 2008 the language and vocabulary of this most widespread of new technologies is familiar to millions. It is from this language that Anupama Chandrasekhar’s funny, fast-paced and immensely thought-provoking Free Outgoing takes its name.

Set in a conservative region of southern India, the play tells the story of Deepa, a high-achieving 15 year-old girl at the centre of an escalating scandal after a video of her with a boy in her classroom is passed around on mobiles and the internet. With outstanding performances from Lolita Chakrabarti, as the single mother struggling to cope with her daughter’s transgression, and Raj Ghatak, who invests his helpful neighbour Ramesh with just the right amount of ambiguity, Free Outgoing primarily deals with the frictions between India’s traditional values and its place at the forefront of a technological revolution. But Chandrasekhar handles family relationships, conflicting desires and some wry observations on modern Indian life with an equally deft touch.

Witty, tense and shocking by turns, Free Outgoing delights in the contrasts of old and new, tradition and technology. The über-modern, middle-class housing colony in which the play takes place still runs very much to the rhythm of the daily water delivery. And Chandrasekhar lends her characters an intriguing vocabulary that mixes English, at once the language of the global future and the imperial past, with local dialect and technological terminology. This is a remarkable play from a remarkable young writer, for whom the future appears to be very bright indeed.