Indian surrogacy at heart of stirring story
A playwright is looking forward to bringing an international story to Stirling.
Made in India comes to the Macrobert Arts Centre on Tuesday, February 14 at 7.30pm.
Satinder Chohan explores the global and personal implications of India’s surrogacy industry in a thrilling new play about motherhood and blood ties between women and nations.
In a surrogacy clinic in Gujarat, three women meet. It’s Londoner Eva’s last chance for motherhood. For village girl Aditi, dairy worker and single mother, surrogacy is a lifeline out of poverty – a chance to giver her own daughters a better chance in life. For clinic owner and businesswoman Dr Gupta, it’s all just another transaction. But with the backdrop of profound global forces, can it possibly remain that simple?
India has been regarded as the world’s ‘surrogacy hub’, one of a handful of countries legally offering commercial surrogacy to parents internationally, although the industry is not fully regulated.
The industry is estimated to be worth over £1.5million, with surrogates themselves being able to earn up to £10,000. During 2016, a change to the law was drafted so that surrogacy The Circus of Horrors visits the Albert Halls on April 21.
The show is celebrating its 21st anniversary as it takes to the road with its latest incarnationThe Never-ending Nightmare.The spectacular features an amazing amalgamation of bizarre, brave and beautiful acts all woven into a Alice in Horrorland type story driven by a mainly original sound scape and performed with a forked tongue firmly in each cheek.
Tickets are on sale now. would become legal only to heterosexual Indian couples married for five years.
Satinder said: “I felt compelled to write a play with surrogacy at its heart as it is such a controversial subject loaded with conflicting emotion, culture and politics. I felt connected to the subject as, with my Indian village roots, the Indian women acting as surrogates that I had read about in news stories could be any number of my female relatives or indeed myself if my parents had taken a different path in life.
“At the same time, I wanted to explore the wider global issue of which surrogacy is a part – the commodification of everything’ in a time when morals are easily sacrificed for financial markets and how we, as privileged Westerners and consumers rely on worker all over the world to provide the material stuff of our lives.”
Satinder’s first production Zameen told the story of a suicidal farmer and his family in India. Crossing The Line touched upon twentysomething Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean and KabaddiKabaddiKabbadi engaged with the lives of illegal immigrants in the UK.