Beginnings
Bengaluru, Late February 2020. If ever the world was shifting on its axis, it’s now. I’ve never been to India before and I have the feeling that the very ground underneath me is falling away, soon it won’t be able to hold the collective weight of human existence and consciousness. I’m on the back of a motorbike speeding through Indian city traffic and I’m holding on so tight to the driver in front that he has to stop and politely ask me to let go a little, because he can’t actually breathe on account of my grasp. I feel foolish and try as hard as I can to loosen my grip as we swerve the lorries, tuk-tuks, buses, dogs, pedestrians and cows as well as the bicycles holding families six a piece.
My driver is the sweetest funniest chatterbox Muslim man who has been tasked with looking after me during my ten-day visit to Christ University. He’s my new friend who tells me of the Mosques burning to the north in Delhi, burning as a result of Hindu on Muslim violence, and he’s worried for friends and family there, where the police are either joining the pyrotechnics or turning a blind eye to this massacre of innocents. It’s happening a thousand miles away but I sense the deep dread, fear and lawlessness from the way he talks. I buy him a sweet lassi in the street and I ask him if he thinks this new Covid thing has reached India, he laughs at me, a deep big belly laugh, saying most people here don’t have running water, we got other things to worry about.
I’m staying in halls at the University which makes me the oldest person sleeping here by about 35 years. The university operates a curfew, everyone is secured inside, gates locked, dogs patrolling what seems to be a moat like perimeter around the walls, by ten o clock. Some people tell me this is the normal nighttime procedure for the students of this strict Catholic Educational Institution whilst others say these are new measures to keep everyone safe with the troubles in the north. I never find out which is true but I lie awake each night listening to the German Shepherd dogs barking, feeling palpable homesickness as I wait for each early morning birdsong, each tropical dawn. How could I know, that almost as soon as I am home in London, I will not be travelling further than my local park a mile away from my house, for the best part of the next eighteen months.
But being there is fully worth the anxiety. I’m there with purpose. My ex-student, Ninad Samaddar, who will build a theatre with own bare hands in Kolkata in the next few years and become one of my closest allies, has brought me here to lecture on the rudiments of Flute Theatre’s work to the staff and students of the University. Ninad had studied at Christs as an undergrad and has become a much-loved teacher. My schedule is punishing, I give three or four talks a day to faculty, doctors and students. Sometimes my words fall on the ears of deaf; received with scorn, scepticism and doubt, at which Ninad and I silently intake some breath, and move on. At other times, it is as though I’m giving the listeners the chance to trust what they already know but are too afraid to say out loud. That is, we may have in our power a greater ability to understand each other, without speaking, than we think we do and that theatre can be beneficial, transcendent and cathartic for both artist and audience. Ninad and I will experience this catharsis in bucketfuls five years later at his not yet built theatre in Kolkata, but in 2020 this was but a dream, like far off mountains turned into clouds.
Ninad managed to persuade a Centre for children with autism and special needs, which was connected to the University and therefore run by Catholic priests, to allow us to make a workshop of The Tempest using my Hunter Heartbeat sensory games. We found the time to prepare some of his students and colleagues, including my now legendary driver, teaching them the games we could use for the workshop. Our workshops are usually for small numbers of people with autism, designed so we can play with them one on one, scanning their bodies in order to meet their specific needs. On that afternoon for our inaugural Flute Theatre workshop in India, there were hundreds of small autistic children in a hall, which never became quiet. Many of them formed a queue around me, on account of my foreignness, my red hair and fair skin. With as many children as possible I played games of fingertip touching; changing rhythms, changing directions, finding their eyes and finding their pleasures. Our common language was entirely non-verbal, an ever-changing dance of smiles, eyes and silliness. If we are what we do every day, I’ll take that day, this is what I do.
There is a short film from that afternoon, Watch Here, shot on a phone, the very roughness of which, captures entirely the chaos both in the classroom and beyond. The priest intimated to me that these children were punished by God (they’re not) and, with some degree of concern, he asked Ninad if I was ‘a believer’ (I’m not). Both Ninad and I did a lot of smiling and nodding to the authorities that afternoon and without ever acknowledging it then, I know that both he and I silently pledged to make this happen in India again and on a more profound and longer lasting timeline. It was to be one Global pandemic and one build of a theatre later before we could make it happen.
Continuing
Kolkata November 2025
We’re on the rooftop of the Marga Wellness Centre deep in the city of Kolkata. Tash, who has been by my side since the day I returned from India in 2020, is singing the names of two autistic adults and they, eyes closed, are walking toward her as she sings. One step closer to her each time they hear their names. This is our Tempest for autistic people. This is Caliban being accepted by Prospero and this, for Vashaj and Tulika, is the chance to be known and accepted through the collective repetition of their sung names. You can watch this HERE
Once they have reached Tash, everyone around the circle joins in the singing of Vashaj and Tulika’s names, in harmony accompanied by beaten drum. They are guided by Ninad as they make their way around the circle of people; actors, participants and carers, we all hold out our fingertips for them to touch and we sing their names as they move at their own pace in a ritual of recognition and love. Ninad is caring for them; he quite literally has their backs whilst the dignity of choice to partake in the drama is entirely theirs.
In Kolkata, we ran a ten-day residency of performances at Ninad’s Urban Theatre Project and in centres for autistic people across the city. Ninad’s theatre is place of hard work, blind faith and creative chance built with the help of his family in the building in which they all grew up. It is for me a place of healing where I am free to make the best theatre I can wish for; theatre that heals invisible wounds, theatre that carves a better world. Ninad harboured the dream of bringing my work there whilst he built the theatre and I gave him encouragement over the five years from 5000 miles away in London. The theatre itself is at the top of the building reached by the narrow winding staircase. The brick work of the floors is a deep red oxide. This is Flute Theatre’s only home where we know the doors are always open.
During the residency in 2025, we met families who are given next to nothing to provide for their autistic loved ones as well as extraordinary teachers and community leaders who are fighting against the odds to support them. As far as I understand, there are very few officially funded special schools. The thinking is thus: in a country where poverty is the number one challenge and the purpose of educating your children is so that they can better their own lives through that education, why would you spend money on educating children with special needs who will never learn in those traditional ways and will always rely on the family anyway? So, it falls to the mothers to begin the provision, creating centres in their own homes in order to care for their own autistic children and provide social contact for them with others in the same position. Some of these mothers continue to run the centres for decades after their own children have grown up. In these centres I recognise courage and humour in the face of adversity as well as a lifetime of experience that we can all learn from. We are returning to make performances with all these people again, in November 2026. I thank Ninad from the bottom of my heart for making The Urban Theatre Project at huge cost to himself and his family, it is a much-needed space that is already changing people’s lives.
Click the link for more information The Urban Theatre Project