The Laboratory...

Conceptualized, Researched & Written: Shivani Tibrewala

Commissioned by: Plymouth Theatre, UK for its Theatrescience festival which uses theatre to bring about awareness of bio-ethical issues.

Cast: Nayantara Roy, Uday Chandra, Anand Ramprasad, Roshan Tirandaz, Tom Alter, Dinyar Tirandaz and J.Brandon Hill

An honest play about multinational pharmaceutical companies conducting unethical drug trials in our country, and using our countrymen like guinea pigs. About the importance of informed consent in a country where doctors are treated like Gods. About sacrifice and disillusionment – the price that love and progress sometimes demand. About a mother and a daughter and the secret that destroys them both...

Synopsis of the Play, “The Laboratory” :
Joy Fernandes aspires to be a doctor. However, with a drunkard for a father it seems a distant dream, till her mother, Mary, finds a solution.

Unknown to Joy, Mary volunteers for a clinical trial at a pharmaceutical firm, whose CEO is Joy’s paternal uncle Ralph Fernandes. It seems like easy money at first since it is a phase I trial and volunteers get paid to participate.

What Mary is not told is that one of the side effects of the drug she is testing for could lead to heart failure. Just before Mary’s death, Joy learns of the medication and the clinical trial.

Meanwhile, Joy is at a relief camp distributing medicines to tsunami victims. Through her journalist boyfriend Arjun, Joy learns that these medicines do not meet World Health Organisation standards and are banned in most countries. When she discovers that her mentor and idol Dr. Pereira is behind all this, a disenchanted Joy, who also loses her father (arrested for domestic violence), ends her life.

The play emphasizes the importance of and challenges involved in obtaining informed consent in a country where doctors are treated like Gods, and raises several complex ethical questions such as should drugs still under testing be available to patients outside the trial, what happens if a patient cannot afford a drug after the trial is over, etc.

Show history:
The First public reading of the play was held at the Alliance Francaise, Bangalore in Oct 2007 by the Theatre Royal Plymouth, UK, for their Theatrescience Festival.
In April 2008 the Indian Council of Medical Research invited us to read the play for their National Bioethics Conference at the PSG Institute of Medical Sciences in Coimbatore.

In November 2008 Mumbai Udayan, a cultural organization, invited us to read the play at the National Gallery of Modern Art.

On 9th February 2009 the play premiered at NGMA at the Kalaghoda festival to a packed house.

Press-speak:
“The play lucidly portrayed how illiterate Indians were exploited and raised pertinent questions on the ethics behind clinical trials...” – The Hindu, Coimbatore