Assistant Professor,

Department of English,

Rishi Bankim Chandra College

Naihati, North 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India

Abstract:

Mohan Rakesh’s Adhe Adhure (1969), translated into English as Halfway House, remains one of the most searching dramatizations of familial collapse in post-independence Indian theatre. Set within a single middle-class household over roughly thirty hours, the play traces how economic precarity, unmet emotional need, and a general failure of language corrode the bonds between husband and wife, and between parents and children. This article argues that the disintegration Rakesh stages are better understood not as simple moral failure but as a form of psychopathology rooted in what R. D. Laing termed ontological insecurity, a condition in which characters, unable to experience themselves as coherent and continuous beings, seek completion through others rather than within themselves. Reading Mahendra Nath’s emasculation, Savitri’s restless pursuit of “a complete man,” and the children’s inherited dysfunction against Laing’s account of the divided self and Erik Erikson’s theory of identity crisis, the article reframes Halfway House as an anatomy of communicative breakdown whose implications extend well beyond its immediate historical moment.