A mix-bag of familial frictions
Ruth D’Silva’s play Bungalow explores the inner secrets and tensions of an Anglo-Indian family. It follows Agatha (Lydia Bakelmun), a woman returning to her childhood bungalow to handle matters related to her dying father, Joseph. Having a strong desire to support and to build a bond with her Youtube-indulging, curry-loving mother Bernadette (Fisun Burgess), Agatha feels a bit helpless as her mother always seem so cold and distant against her, refusing to “have a chat” – to face what happened in the past. However, with the arrival of her naive British boyfriend Steve (Jack Bence), and her brother Luke (Mikhael DeVille), whose own marriage is falling apart, the bungalow can no longer hold the family’s shameful secrets. Ultimately, Agatha has to confront the ways her family enabled the abuse she endured.
Bungalow is ambitious. It intends to comment upon a wide range of difficult themes: CSBD (Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder) due to trauma, Anglo-Indian’s Christian traditions, the patriarch’s shameful secret of paedophile, the matriarch who knows everything but remains silent, and the toxic mother- daughter relationship… However, the narrative fails to fully engage with these complexities. Over its two-hour running time, the story is crowded with trivial talks and frictions between different pairings, and half of them revolving around Bernadette.
Although each conversation gradually reveals details about Agatha’s past, these revelations remain merely informative rather than thematically resonant. While you can sense early on that something traumatic has shaped Agatha, and you can predict the general direction of the plot, these revelations never fully connect to what they mean for Agatha herself, her relationship with her mother, the house, or their future. There’s nothing truly embedded beyond revelation itself, staying on a superficial, plot-driven level without deeper dramaturgical reflection or significance. And when “truth” is eventually revealed in second half, it feels too less, too little, and too late.
The creative team however, works hard to elevate the play’s heavy themes. Director Beth Kapila keeps the transitions between conversations swift and brisk, aided by José Guillermo Puello’s sometimes melodic, sometime haunting soundscape. However, the choice to have Agatha spend much of the play curled up in the stage-right corner seems to diminish her presence as the play’s heroine, making her feel trivial and insignificant, especially when compared to her always-present mother. Cheng Keng’s lighting is exceptionally magical. It not only simultaneously reflects Agatha’s internal turmoil, but also creates beautiful scars across the wall of Caitlin Mawhinney’s stifling, claustrophobic bungalow set, subtly suggesting that even the house itself can no longer bear the weight of accumulated abuse, indifference, and emotional suffering.