Aleks sierz biography of mahatma

Nobodies who kill somebodies: let’s make a list. Okay, there’s Lee Harvey Oswald (JFK), James Earl Ray (MLK) and Mark Chapman (John Lennon). But what about the man who shot Mahatma Gandhi? What was his name? The fact that Nathuram Godse is relatively unknown, at least in the West, while Gandhi is a household name, is one of the motivations behind Anupama Chandrasekhar’s epic history play, which was first staged at the National Theatre last year, and now returns, this time with Olivier Award-winner Hiran Abeysekera (Life of Pi) as Godse and Paul Bazely reprising his role as Gandhi. But as well as being a dazzling account of Indian history in the first half of the 20th century, it is also a meditation on fact and fiction.

Because not much is known about Nathuram Godse’s life, Chandrasekhar has been free to invent a biography which involves, she explicitly says, “some dramatic licence”, eliding years and events to make the storytelling