State of Denial is by far Raul Varma’s best work as a playwright since Bhopal. Most astonishing is that he has mastered the voices of women in crises and in extremis with elegance and poetic savagery. This is a painfully difficult play to produce, but Teesri Duniya has taken the challenge and for the most part succeeded where no other theatre company would dare to go.

Vigil is an elegant farce concerning a misanthropic young man who abandons his boring job at a bank and races a thousand miles across the country to be at the bedside of his dying aunt. Marcel Jeanin was brilliant as the sociopathic nephew, using a comic time that has a fierce ruthlessness. He played the part with balletic assurance and inhabited the role with nebbish-like klutziness that was nothing short of stunning.