Hannah Goodwin and S. Shakthidharan’s The Wrong Gods arrive with quiet force. Set in rural India during the Green Revolution, it examines the slow violence of progress through a single family. Change here is not a dramatic rupture. It slides in through smiles, spreadsheets, and language that sounds like care. The consequences, however, land like grief.
Isha, a teenage girl with a restless mind, longs to see the world beyond her village. Her teacher, Ms Devi, encourages this gently, while her mother, Nirmala, urges her to stay. Nirmala has already watched her husband walk away in search of a better life. What remains is the land, the rituals, and the gods she honours in silence. Her resistance to change is not stubbornness. It’s survival.
The arrival of Laxmi, a development worker, introduces a new vocabulary: yield, efficiency, prosperity. She listens kindly and speaks softly. Her name is shared with the Hindu goddess of wealth and it carries its own weight. The offer she brings feels generous, but the terms remain hazy. What seems like an opportunity to Isha is something far more uneasy for those watching from the edges.
The production is exquisitely restrained. The stage is framed by a ring of soil, its texture cracked and dry. A diya flickers low. A swing hangs centre-stage, becoming at various points a cradle, an altar, and a seat of conflict. There are no major scene changes throughout the show, instead the actors reconfigure the space with their bodies. The effect is rhythmic and ritualistic, a kind of breathing between moments. It reminded me of watching a ceremony unfold — slow, deliberate, and entirely absorbing.
The costume design marks the characters’ emotional and ideological drift. Isha and Laxmi begin in flowing, light fabrics. As they move deeper into the logic of development, their clothing becomes structured, their silhouettes more rigid. Nirmala and Devi remain rooted in earth-toned cotton. What they wear never shifts, because neither do their beliefs.
One of the most quietly powerful aspects of the play, for me, is how it treats faith. There is no spectacle, no mysticism. Faith lives in stillness. When Nirmala crouches and presses her hands into the dirt, she does not ask the gods for anything. She simply listens. The gesture carries a kind of ancestral weight. It is quiet, instinctive, and deeply rooted, like the knowledge of breathing passed down through generations.
Performances are strong across the board. Nadie Kammallaweera as Nirmala is quietly devastating. Her stillness is loaded, her voice weighted with memory. She delivers the line “I let you go because I love you” with such tenderness it stings. Radhika Mudaliyar’s Isha is lively and conflicted, pulled between possibility and loyalty. Vaishnavi Suryaprakash plays Laxmi with a persuasive composure that never slips into villainy. Her calmness is unnerving precisely because she truly believes what she is saying. That kind of role is difficult to land. It requires full conviction without exaggeration, a steady presence that feels sincere but still carries danger. Suryaprakash makes that balance look effortless. And Manali Datar’s Devi is warm, steady, and luminous — the person who keeps everyone else from falling apart too quickly.
The sound design, by Steve Francis, layers the space with gentle hums and deep silences. A thunderclap during a moment of confrontation between Nirmala, Devi, and Laxmi slices the room open. It lands with precision, then vanishes, leaving the air thick with everything that was unsaid.
If the production falters, it does so only briefly. Some scenes in the second act run long, allowing emotion to soften when it should tighten. Laxmi’s institutional context remains slightly underdeveloped. Her impact is clear, but the system behind her is left abstract. A few lines in the script stretch too far into metaphor, risking distance where intimacy has been so carefully built.
Still, these are small notes within a larger achievement. The Wrong Gods is a rare work, one that trusts its audience to pay attention, to sit with tension, to recognise themselves in the quiet moments where belief begins to slip. It does not ask for pity or outrage. It simply asks us to look closely at what we’ve accepted, and why.
By the final scene, Nirmala holds the soil in her hands and stares into something she cannot name. She does not weep. She does not speak. Her silence is the most articulate moment in the play. At Belvoir St Theatre until 31st May, this production was a powerful reminder that loss rarely arrives all at once. It arrives in increments, sealed in good intentions. If it returns, go see it. I did, and it hasn’t left me since.
