A murder mystery with juicy roles for Indian Aunties? Sandy’s got you.
Sananda Chatterjee’s first play Kitty Party / Mt Roskill Murder Club aims to entertain and represent. It’s her take on a classic Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery delivered with a cast of eccentric Aunties; layered characters inspired by the beloved Kitty Parties of North India and her childhood in Delhi. It’s also her very first play.
“A quiet Mt Roskill street is rocked by a suspicious death, turning a regular weekly gathering of women into a night of spiralling paranoia and spilled tea.”
Born in Kolkata and raised between Delhi and Tāmaki Makaurau, Sananda brings a deeply layered creative practice shaped by theatre, identity, movement, and community. A multi-disciplinary artist and producer, her work spans large ensemble pieces with Prayas Theatre to intimate & independent projects exploring gender, relationships, and belonging.
Sananda is also sought-after producer, mentor, researcher and Cultural Insights specialist (currently at The Big Idea). She cares deeply about how stories land, who they speak to, and how they shift us.
Now in the driver’s seat, Sandy chats to PAT about what keeps her coming back to this one.
Where do you draw inspiration for your project?
I started thinking about this project as a way to make space for older South Asian women actors who I knew were out there, turning up to Prayas auditions, but for whom the scripts just weren’t being written. We had to dig so hard to find good stories where women weren’t just sexy lampshades. So that was really the genesis — seeing all these talented women from the community continue to show up, only to be turned away because there were no roles for them, or be forced into bitsy parts, or have three separate characters smashed together to make one juicy role for a good actor. I thought I’d have a crack at it, and wrote up a one-pager maybe four or five years ago.
Were there particular experiences, ideas, or tensions that inspired this piece?
The Kitty Party! It’s a social gathering for women, usually organised by stay-at-home women, and often includes a regular savings component. It’s typically a monthly event, and I knew it as something common in North India, especially in Delhi, where I grew up.
When I read more about it, I learned it may date back to post-Partition India, when many families were struggling financially. Each woman would contribute a set amount, and the pooled money for that month — the kitty — would go to one member of the group. It also became a safe space for women to relax, experience joy, and enjoy an afternoon together. The exchange of information at these gatherings is incredible. It’s a true community. And that felt like such an interesting structure to base a murder mystery on. Of course the content has evolved over the years, as the world has and my feelings have changed and resolved etc so it isn’t the same story I started with – but the essence of it remains the same – the bonds of women.
What are you hoping to get out of your development reading?
A good draft, really. Something that will hopefully have a life beyond this reading. I want to see how much I need to stay within the genre, and how much I can stretch it.
What made this a story you wanted to tell, and what keeps you coming back to this story, on a personal level?
I love friendship between women (and all who consider themselves in this category) — there’s this classic combination of affection, care, and brutal honesty that gets dished out as needed. I know my gaggle of geese will, with great pleasure, remind me of all my terrible past romantic choices while also absolutely helping me bury a body (IN THEORY). There is also something incredible about the idea of ‘aunties’ and the way information travels through them. When I was growing up in Delhi, all the kids were so wary of the neighbourhood aunties who would casually stand at their windows watching what everyone got up to. They had a network to rival any spy agency. I got into trouble TOO MANY times as a young person because of that network. But as I’ve grown older, and their prisons have become clearer to me, I’ve found I have so much empathy for them. I want to know more about them. I want them to be at the centre of the narratives. I bet they could fill many books with the stories they have to tell.
What’s one thing you’d like to share about your writing process?
The process is chaos, and the method is very pressure-driven. I don’t know why I thought I would suddenly be any different from how I wrote my papers at university. Back before you could submit essays electronically, you had to take them to your tutor or lecturer’s office and put them in a box or hand them over in person. I still have a very real memory of running from Kate Edgar Commons to the old Film building to make the cut-off with one minute to spare. Ya, so. NOTHING’s changed. But I do genuinely need the noise of time to be silenced — it really is a barrier. The kind of pressure that makes it impossible to focus on anything else is what I need. BUT I have learned this about myself: if I know the world well, the story will be much easier to pen – so I guess I kept dreaming about the world and really detailed it in my head, even as I procrastinate from putting the final touches on it!
What’s one question you have about your own script or story at this point? Or a problem you’re trying to solve?
I think, as a murder mystery fangirl who is always guessing the killer from the get-go, what I’m most interested in finding out is whether the vehicle of the genre holds for the story. Have I given myself too big a problem to solve? For my first feature-length work? HAVE I??
We can’t wait to find out!
Sananda is supported by dramaturg/director Sameena Zehra (Tea with Terrorists) along with a gorgeous cast including Pamela Sidhu (Spartacus: House of Ashur), Sudeepta Vyas (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), Arti Kansara (Much Ado About Nothing), Ayesha Heble (Shortland Street) and Karishma Grebneff (Basmati Bitch).
Kitty Party / Mt. Roskill Murder Club
by Sananda Chatterjee
Sat 13 June, 7:30pm
The Factory Theatre, Onehunga
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