Docudrama meets quality soap opera in David Hare’s latest truth commission.

Covent Garden Odeon, London
March 12, 2015

Behind the Beautiful Forevers feels like a mixture of a challenging film documentary and a superior TV soap with a good story line, which may not be what you’d expect to hear about the latest play by David Hare, one of the UK National Theatre’s star playwrights. Internationally Hare is chiefly known for his Academy Award nominated screenplays for The Hours and The Reader but back home he has written play after play which have succeeded in focusing the UK public’s attention on some truths about the society it has created. Presenting these often unpalatable truths as a great night out at the theatre is a pretty neat trick which Hare has pulled off repeatedly, and with Behind the Beautiful Forevers he’s done it again.  The truths examined in this production are not however truths about the UK but disturbing insights into Indian society and the global economic realities that impact upon it: and that probably makes them home truths for us all.

The...