WEDDING ALBUM

Wedding Album Girish Karnad's latest play deals with an event so common in the life of the urban middle class in India today and yet so fraught with anxiety that it has provided the staple for innumerable tele-serials and commercial films: the impending 'arranged' marriage of a girl to a 'suitable' expat boy. The Indian wedding is expected to bring the clan together in a display of solidarity and mutual concern. Yet it is known to light the fuse of anxieties and resentments long buried within the bosom of the family. Forces raging in the world around also bring their own tensions to the event: the older generation feels defunct in the new technological turmoil; the young are buffeted by aspirations to easy prosperity and notions of sexual freedom; and dreams and phantasms ardently desired but only vaguely grasped turn into nightmares as they waft in from the other side of the globe. In one of the most penetrating intellectual explorations of the situation in modern Indian drama Karnad weaves these strands together to create a play which is funny poignant and deeply unsettling.