To Woman or Not To Be is an awkward title, but it’s the perfect one to describe the powerful experiment that Adishakti – Laboratory for Theatre Art Research put up in Mumbai recently. Going in, the play expected the audience to possess a working knowledge of Hamlet, the Prince (or in this case, the Princess) of Denmark, infected with the need to avenge the death of a parent, convinced it was a murder. That’s because Vinay Kumar and Nimmy Raphel, core members of the Pondicherry-based theatre company, turn the 16th century Shakespearean drama inside out. Raphel turns the Prince into a katana-wielding ninja, who is slumming it with other cos-play superheroes when she is recalled to her father’s kingdom (Kumar plays the distant patriarch) after he marries her recently deceased mother’s sister. In this retelling, Raphel asks the quintessential existential “to be or not to be” question, but only after asking other, more urgent ones. Am I allowed the desire to seek revenge, she asks her mother’s ghost.
Unlike Hamlet, whose ghost — a deceased father — seeks revenge, Raphel’s spectre responds differently. No, go live your life, she says. Don’t waste your time in the past. That’s advice from a mother to a daughter, the play avers, even as it questions the gendered nature of monarchy, power, and the price of maintaining it. Shakespeare’s Hamlet never asks if he is allowed revenge, but the Princess of Denmark does, and draws our attention to the gendered nature of revenge. Gender, after all, is an experience of socio-economic-cultural-political constraints. For a woman, it often also means the denial of permission granted to men, including the permission to seek blood justice.
While it isn’t new to experiment with one of the GOAT theatrical offerings from 16th century England — its play-within-a-play structure, unflinching focus on internal conflict, and masterful depiction of one man’s bad decisions that lead to everyone’s downfall — has proved relevant through the ages. In recent times, some of the best experiments have emerged from post-colonial subjects of the Global South, grounding Hamlet’s presence in a neoliberal world full of men with unchecked power that democratic structures can’t seem to hold back. Rethinking Hamlet as a woman allows us to examine the internal logic of the character (men must avenge their humiliation and loss of power; the natural order of primogeniture must be maintained; to love someone is to exercise power over their will, etcetera). Human emotions may well be universal, but the human experience is anything but. Especially if you’re a monarch.
The theatre company has taken the play across different cities since the start of the month --- they end, for now, in Pune, on the 24th and 25th.
Another play to take a seemingly universal experience — that of a cancer survivor’s — and to prise open its underlying assumptions is actor Tannishtha Chatterjee’s Breast of Luck, which will be staged in Mumbai on January 29 and 30, and later at the Kala Ghoda Festival on February 4. The two-person play, starring Chatterjee and Sharib Hashmi, has been devised by Chatterjee based on her own experience of being diagnosed with oligometastatic ductal carcinoma in 2025. It uses one of the most debilitating medical issues of our times to think about the nature of companionship, love, and significantly, desirability. “Hashmi’s wife, Nasreen, is a four-time cancer survivor, and he once told me that she treats it like it’s a common cold, with that sort of positive, can-do spirit,” Chatterjee said. Her own experience, however, she admits, frightened her. At the same time, receiving the diagnosis that falls within the category of reproductive organs cancer, also brought home the gendered nature of the experience of being a patient. Having chosen to not undergo reconstructive surgery, Chatterjee found herself questioning what would make her character desirable, given that the breast — both a symbol as well as a site of desire — was deformed. Desire, then, needed to find other anchors. It’s a romcom, she says. In our play, the character sings, and the desirable thing is the music, though she doesn’t have any hair or even any eyebrows now, Chatterjee adds.
This is not to say that there is a universal experience for women, and to expect one is to deny how power hierarchies work. Gender allows us to slice through such assumptions and often, the finer the distinction, the more incisive the slice.
