After productions at the Bush and the Theatre by the Lake, American dramatist Rajiv Joseph’s Obie-winning play gets an atmospheric revival as 2024’s JMK Award production.
It is a ninety-minute two-hander set in Agra in 1648 on the day that the building of the Taj Mahal is completed, and it draws on the apocryphal story of how Shah Jehan sought to ensure that his mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal would remain unchallenged as the world’s most beautiful building.
Friends Humayun and Babur are low-ranking guards in the Emperor’s service on duty guarding the site so that no-one but builders and craftsmen may see its construction and under orders to stay silent and not even try to steal a glimpse of the building themselves before its completion.
Humayun (Maanuv Thiara) lives by the rulebook; he wants to prove to his father (higher up in the imperial service) that he is worthy. Babur (Usaamah ibraheem Hussain) is younger, more excitable and more imaginative; he can’t keep his mouth shut. Humayun may gruffly point out that his friend has his sword at the wrong height, but Babur rabbits on wondering when they might become guards in the Emperor’s harem and recounting a dream in which he saw a flying palanquin (he names it an airplane). While Babur conjures fantasies of naked females, for Humayun, a harem is a government department, and he is much less successful in imagining future inventions.
Their duties don’t end as the final day dawns. as they still have to carry out the Emperor’s orders: 20,000 workers and artists must have their hands chopped off to prevent them from making anything else so lovely. Babur wields his sword, Humayun the cauterising iron. Then they have to clean up—and the place is now running with blood.
Their efficiency wins praise from the authorities—and promotion to guarding the Emperor as he visits his harem—but they are both traumatised. Humayan loses his sight (fortunately temporary) while Babur seeks justice, and this is where a four-century-old legend becomes increasingly relevant to our own times. Does “carrying out orders” excuse actions? Why should others pay the cost for the aims of authority? What is the value of beauty?
Adam Karim’s production maintains a delicate balance between its dark, brooding and laugh-out-loud humour while allowing the actors to express a delicate bond between the two characters: just watch the way Humayun cradles Babur and washes the blood from his body. The reality of their performances makes you believe in the action.
It s staged very simply, played out on a stepped, octagonal plinth patterned with Islamic geometry, a wooden mast rising from its centre, and designer Roisin Jenner puts the guards in modern singlets and what look like tracksuit trousers (even a zip fly) with a swathe of cloth over a shoulder to suggest a past era. Elliot Griggs’s lighting, responsive throughout, dazzlingly represents the Taj Mahal’s white marble beauty with sound designer Xana and composer Niraj Chag providing everything from individual birdsong to majestic clamour.
Beautifully nuanced, what starts out as very funny makes an engrossing ninety minutes: Adam Karim delivers a production that shows why he won the award that gave him the chance to stage it.