Vol. 3, Issue 1, Part A (2021)

Halfway House, or Adhe Adhure in Hindi, is one of the most poignant plays depicting the urban middle-class family. Rakesh brings forth the transition of values in the the-then society with utmost excellence and shows the changing dynamics between a man and woman’s equation. Written in the year 1969, Halfway House talks about how hollow and shallow the existence of the bourgeois class were. Rakesh picks up several traits from the Theatre of Absurd (Ionesco, Brecht, Beckett etc.) and the Theatre of Idea (Camus, Sartre, Shaw etc.) and applies the ideologies in this play. Not only him but other playwrights of this era also used this mechanism to portray the important enquiry about one’s existentialism. The characters in this play follow the same path and remain incomplete until the end. Rakesh draws them as fragmented pieces of their own predicaments, and the women suffer way more than men. The corrosiveness of a crumbling family comes out through its members, and Rakesh makes it happen by using concerns or elements of naturalistic, realistic, absurd and existentialistic. The characters are so life-like that they represent the very basic emotions of human like that of crudity, ugliness, corruption, vulgarity etc. As the audience watch the play, they realise Rakesh’s desire and longing for a fresh and new morality. Like many of his other contemporaries, he deals with subjects about sex, love and violence. The frustration and anger playing in the minds of the youth of the post-1960 era come up in many plays. The revolutionary ideas are contradictory to established values and conventional norms. Despite the disappointing tone, Rakesh’s love for humanity and commitment to values can be understood in his plays.