British playwright, novelist, essayist and social commentator JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls was first staged in Russia in 1945. This weekend, writer and stage director Abhyuday Tamhankar brings it to a theatre space and café in Versova. In this play, Tamhankar says he revisits how thinkers critiqued the hypocrisies of bourgeois English society, and hoped for the establishment of a fair life for all, through Priestley’s expression of socialism. The 37-year-old says, “As a writer, thinker, and thespian, I like to study and present works of philosophy and literature, especially from the Age of Enlightenment. Primarily, because that epoch represents an intellectual shift from a theological and dogmatic line of thought towards liberation, emancipation, and reason.”

Actor Beauty Hazarika who plays Sybil Birling, the matriarch in the upper middle class Birling family and a suspect in the suicide of Eva Smith, a working class woman, describes that playing the character with conviction will help her to bring Birling to life on stage within the space of a drawing room. She tells us, “This play, portraying class segregation, in another time and country, is no different from what we witness today; we can’t deny the economic and social segregation prevalent. And the crude revelation of this segregation is what I like about the play.” Hazarika expresses the need to stir the thinking patterns of viewers, specifically about topics that we are accustomed to, but shouldn’t be. Tamhankar continues, “I’d like the audience to walk away enlightened on these topics and with an optimism, positivity and a sense of hopefulness that society can continue its steady progression towards  enlightenment.”