WRITTEN by the award-winning Indian-born playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar, When the Crows Visit is set in India with a theme that takes us straight to the underbelly of that subcontinent’s culture.

The play draws on two main sources — the infamous gang-rape and mutilation of a girl in Delhi in 2012 and the long-held adage that “the sins of the father are visited upon the son” as explored to thrilling effect by Ibsen in his play Ghosts. Ibsen, though, this isn’t.

What is striking about the play is the sense it gives of a terrible, lost society. Not only are the men unexceptionally gross, uncaring and brutal to women but the women, or rather the mothers, collude in the abuse and enable it to continue.

Everything is kept under wraps in the interests of social standing and reputation. Snobbery of the worst kind means that no-one cares for anyone who is not in their social circle. Anyone can be bought off and justice subverted at any stage.

When the mother cries out in despair to her son: “I wanted you to be a good man!” what should be a devastating howl from the heart sounds like a petulant complaint because nowhere in the play does anyone appear to know what “goodness” is.

The Kiln’s artistic director Indhu Rubasingham commissioned the play and directs but is unable, in the end, to create a consistency of tone or purpose. Yes, rape is a riveting subject and holds our shocked attention; yes, it is fascinating to feel the tensions that shake one Indian family. But it takes us nowhere.

There are some lovely actors — Ayesha Dharker as the mother Hema and Bally Gill as her son Akshay hold the stage with their presence and poise and all the cast fill out the characters in an attempt to make them real.

Yet the characters can’t live fully because writer and director won’t allow them, so absorbed are they in the rightness of their agenda and their dependence on shared public outrage.

The theme may be dramatic but the execution is less so as the play swerves erratically from comedy to horror and from excessive shouting to a purposeless and limp, if ghastly, finale.

The urgent theme of male abuse and dominance still cries out for answers by that conclusion.

Runs until November 30, box office: kilntheatre.com