A break from Bollywood: make a song and dance about this brave Indian play

The Indian film industry may shy away from swearing and realism on screen, but Ram Ganesh Kamatham's Dancing on Glass shows a darker and angrier vision of India on stage

At New Delhi's Habitat Centre, a young actor has just unleashed a string of expletives in both English and Kannada, drawing gasps from the audience. They have, however, been warned. All of the publicity for the play, Dancing on Glass, carried notices about the amount of profanities it contains. It's a necessity in a country where bad language on stage is still relatively rare, and where family-friendly Bollywood megastars like Shahrukh Khan have made it clear how uncomfortable they are about swearing on screen.

Fortunately for writer-director Ram Ganesh Kamatham, and the actor in question, the gasps are also accompanied by peals of laughter. While the play has attracted some measure of controversy for its robust language, any criticism has been drowned out by plaudits praising Kamatham's talent for dialogue, and recognising that the violence of his language is a symptom of his dedication to a sometimes brutal realism.

In a cultural climate dominated by escapist Bollywood narratives, where a song-and-dance routine is never more than a few minutes away, the concept of realism can be every bit as shocking as the swearing.

Bollywood is notorious for churning out vast quantities of films that take pride in being entertainment and nothing more. Young playwrights like Kamatham are stepping in to fill the void.

Dancing on Glass is set during Bangalore's technological boom of the early 2000s and while it is sharply written and often funny, it's also a play that is angry at the human cost of rapid economic growth.

Bangalore is known as the "Silicon Valley of India" and both characters in this two-hander are exhausted, frustrated "cyber-coolies". That is, they are twentysomethings working for western call centres and software companies, overqualified and underpaid. Forced to deal with the death of a mutual friend, the play does well to squeeze humour out of grief, frustration and existential angst. It also captures the alienating nature of call-centre work in a way that dispels the perhaps inevitable comparisons that its setting has drawn with Slumdog Millionaire.

Kamatham's other plays, including Creeper and Bust, have drawn on India's rich tradition of mythologies and local legends in a similar way to more established playwrights like Girish Karnad . Unlike Karnad however, Kamathan writes predominantly in English, and his contemporary settings have drawn in a younger audience. He's also remarkably prolific: Dancing on Glass was one in a series of three plays that he recently staged in Delhi over three nights.

It's refreshing and exhilarating to see a darker and angrier vision of India on stage, in stark contrast to the way the country is portrayed both in the west and by its own film industry. If the audience were initially shocked by the dialogue, they were left, for a change, with plenty to think about.