A still from A Woman or Not To Be: How Adishakti challenges misogyny in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

The play is written by Vinay Kumar KJ, the Artistic Director of Adishakti. One-and-a-half years ago, he read a news item about a boy throwing acid on a girl after she rejected his advances. Since then, a preoccupation with gender has been at the foreground of his work. His previous production, Bhoomi, was about a rape survivor and where she stood within civil society.

A powerful, hard-wired performer, Kumar was a disciple of Chawla and played the lead actor in many of her plays, including Savitri (1992) and Brihannala (1997). The news of the attack made him wonder if the fault wasn’t in our stories.

“Do you see any ethical difference between the acid attack and what Othello or Hamlet did? I couldn’t. In both plays, patriarchy causes tragedies. Desdemona and Ophelia are both casualties of the male ego. The more we search, we see how misogyny is hidden within great literature,” says Kumar, who appears in the play as the king, as a psychiatrist and also an official of a preventive prison, where Princess Hamlet is confined.

That is when he began writing his version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, Hamlet. In Kumar’s imagination, Hamlet is a woman; a princess. The audience first meets Princess Hamlet at her birthday party. Everybody is in costume and Hamlet is dressed as a Samurai.

Painting a picture of the protagonist, Nimmy Raphel, the play director, says, “Princess Hamlet is 20, in college, headstrong, restless and filled with youthful angst. She is an ardent fan of Japanese manga and anime, and a dedicated practitioner of martial arts. When she receives devastating news from home, she returns to find her mother, the reigning Queen, murdered, and her aunt married to her father.”

Unlike the original, the ghostly vision of the dead parent does not urge the grieving child into blood lust. Instead, the phantom urges her not to seek revenge but to complete her education and protect herself from future danger. “For the grieving, enraged young woman, this plea for restraint becomes unbearable,” adds Raphel, who is also the Managing Trustee of Adishakti Theatre, and has trained in the institution’s performance methodology under Chawla. She is a veteran of performing in and directing plays such as Nidrawathwam (2011).

A Woman or Not to Be — which opened at Ranga Shankara in Bengaluru earlier this month, and will be staged at Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai and Pune’s The Box now — is executed in Adishakti’s quintessential form where choreography and interactive physical movement are interspersed with silences and unexpected changes in a well known story, and Shakespeare is one of the most commonly performed playwrights in the world. In addition to the numerous adaptations for the screen and the stage in the past, this year the Royal Shakespeare Company has announced its Hamlet tour and a film with the same name and Riz Ahmed as the Prince of Denmark, will hit the theatres in February. Hamnet, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s powerful novel of the same name, won the Best Drama at the Golden Globe awards recently.

“I love Shakespeare’s language but, in the plot, danger is lurking, which is rarely called out or engaged with,” Kumar says, emphasising the need for a closer examination of the social blind spots within iconic texts. “The fundamental issue is that all of Hamlet’s iconic brooding is a privileged space that only a male can indulge in. Why is it that, even today, it’s problematic for a woman to make a reasoned argument? She needs to shout in order to be heard. Hamlet is a classic type of a masculine male pedalling misogyny,” he says.