Q&A with the director of 'Nirbhaya'

In December 2012, the streets rose in waves of protest following the violent sexual assault of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi.

"Her death was -- for me and so many others -- a point of no return. I realised that our silences make us complicit," says actor Poorna Jagannathan.

Remembering a powerful play called Amajuba she'd seen in New York in 2006, which was based on the testimonies of five South Africans who came of age during the apartheid, she got in touch with its director Yaël Farber, an internationally-renowned South African director and playwright.

"Yaël and I sought to create a similar piece of theatre to address an issue that has been silenced for too long," she adds.

The resulting play, titled Nirbhaya ('fearless one', the moniker given to the young woman by the Indian press), was initiated in a month-long workshop this February in Mumbai with film and stage actors such as Tillotama Shome, Rasika Dugal and Priyanka Bose, in addition to Jagannathan.

The cast has since changed -- with Farber's insistence on covering a broader spectrum, and to do justice to the scale and depth of violence that had to be addressed. With Jagannathan and Bose as constants, it now includes acid attack victim Sneha Jawale and hairstylist Sapna Bhavnani. 

At the Edinburgh Fringe, Nirbhaya won the Herald Angel Award and the Scotsman Fringe First Award, which recognises outstanding new theatre work. The India premiere is on March 17, 2014 in Mumbai, following which it will travel to Delhi and Bengaluru. Book your tickets here.

In an exclusive interview with Vogue features editor Anindita Ghose, Farber discusses her powerful new project.

How would you best describe the format of this play? 

Nirbhaya could broadly be described as a testimonial work. 

With the rape and death of Jyoti Singh Pandey as the central 'inciting incident', this is a voyage into the realm of personal testimonies of the performers, who have survived various forms of sexual violence themselves. 

In the wake of Jyoti's death, the streets rose in protest. But at a very intimate level, veils of silence were torn away. Her death somehow penetrated deep into the personal realm for countless people. 

This production is a way to continue the courage people found in those days after her death, shattering the shame-based silence that has prevented sexual violence from being discussed publicly, despite the staggering statistics. 

By performers offering their personal testimonies, we see how that young woman's unspeakable suffering was made possible by a system that enables perpetrators and protects them from any real accountability. 

Beyond the darkness though, Nirbhaya bears witness to the human spirit's extraordinary capacity for survival and redemption. We hope it moves, inspires and speaks for enduring change.

What are the common threads between your plays Amajuba and Nirbhaya? 

Amajuba was a work based on the testimonies of five South Africans who came of age during the most brutal years of the apartheid regime in South Africa, my native country. 

I was asked to create a new work at the time and chose to explore the effects that the vast system of apartheid had on the actors' individual lives. Only in the details of another person's life do we find their humanity and become human beings ourselves. This is the power of testimonial theatre. 

Amajuba was the telling of five stories plucked from the millions untold. Nirbhaya will engage with personal testimony with the same no-holds-barred intensity. 

The mix of actors has changed significantly since you began, since you were looking for a certain mix in the demographic and the stories. Could you explain?

We had an extraordinary group of seven women (Mansi Multani, Tillotama Shome, Maya Sarao, Swara Bhaskar, Rasika Agashe, Priyanka Bose and Poorna Jagannathan) who gathered each day with me in Mumbai to speak through the various issues and emotions that Jyoti's death had triggered.

But in order to do justice to the scale and depth of sexual violence that needed to be spoken of, we needed performers who had histories of sexual violence at a level that could represent the reality behind the statistics. 

Finding a broader socio-economic demographic is a challenge. Language, accessibility, performance skills, the ability of women more deeply entrenched in poverty makes their participation limited -- but we will reach for stories across the range by speaking as women and touching the realities of women's lives through testimonies of some of society's most enabled women. 

What is the role of the singer in this play? Is she more like a narrator? 

The singer is a powerful emblem. She is all women. She is what Jyoti became: Nirbhaya. Fearless One. Daughter of the Nation. Jewel. But the real darkness of that night resides with this figure and what she endured.

Will there be any differences in the play's Indian and international formats? 

No. I am a firm believer in making a piece of theatre about a society -- for that society as an audience. What Indian audiences will see is what we send into the world.