Theatre director Yaël Farber is staging an intervention against the culture of denial

A recent case of shocking sexual violence in India has inspired the latest work by the South African theatre director and playwright Yaël Farber.

Yaël Farber’s Nirbhaya, whose unique mixture of testimonial, transformation and protest addresses sexual violence in India. William Burdett-Coutts / April 2014
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“I have a personal mandate and it happens to be deeply politicised,” the award-winning theatre director and playwright Yaël Farber tells me when I meet her at London’s Southbank on the penultimate day of the London run of her play Nirbhaya, as part of WOW – Women of the World Festival. “I don’t think there’s a single thing we do in our lives that is apolitical – from the clothes we buy, to the coffee we drink, to the way we speak to the homeless person on the street, even what we choose to forget.

“I’m a white South African,” she continues. “I grew up in a society that was deeply engaged with ­rearranging facts so that we believed certain things and were able to dispense with empathy for fellow human beings.”

Farber is worried it sounds rather “grandiose”, clearly uncomfortable with being misinterpreted, but admits that her work is driven by a participation in “the repair of the world”. Take, for example, her testimonial theatre and you find a deep engagement with the trauma caused by the society she grew up in. Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise, based on the lives of its cast, told the stories of five South Africans who came of age during the most brutal years of the country’s apartheid regime; Woman in Waiting explored what life was like for women under apartheid, told through the memories of one woman, Thembi Mtshali-Jones; and He Left Quietly was based on the life of Duma Kumalo, a man who, through one of the many miscarriages of justice that occurred during apartheid, spent years on South Africa’s death row.

Nirbhaya is equally politicised, but it’s also a production that combines testimonial with protest theatre, something of a new direction in Farber’s work. It’s based on the horrific real events of December 2012 in India. A woman, thereafter dubbed Nirbhaya (Fearless) by the press, was gang raped by six men on a bus in Delhi, sexually assaulted so violently with an iron bar that 95 per cent of her intestines were destroyed. After 90 minutes of torture, she and the male friend she’d been travelling with (himself beaten up by the attackers) were thrown from the vehicle where they then lay in the street, ignored by passersby for a further two hours.

The police were finally called but didn’t want to soil their uniforms with her blood, so her gravely injured friend had to lift her into a car to eventually take her to hospital. Thirteen days later, Nirbhaya died from her injuries, but in the meantime all hell had broken loose: the story became international news; people took to the streets of India to protest against the country’s ­ignored but pervasive sexual violence; and Poorna Jagannathan, a Bollywood/Holly­wood actress contacted Farber with her own confession and cry to arms: “I am a victim of sexual violence who has been silent all these years,” she wrote to Farber, recorded by the latter in a piece about the play’s genesis published in The Guardian. “By keeping quiet, I consider myself a part of what happened on that bus. Come here. Women in India are ready to break their silence and speak. There is no turning back.”

Jagannathan was indeed ready to speak out and the play is as much about her and the other female cast members’ stories of abuse as it is Nirbhaya’s. Farber used the horrific incident on the bus as a catalyst for the other players’ stories, and each woman involved breaks her years of silence on the stage.

Discussing the perpetual lack of funding for the arts (the money for Nirbhaya’s Indian tour was raised in a Kickstarter campaign), Farber confesses, however, that she’s actually extremely grateful for not having been handed “a whole lot of toys to play with on stage” when she was younger, as without deprivations “I would not be the director I am today where I have had to make things from nothing”. Nirbhaya is a beautiful case in point – raw, stripped down but immensely moving – that allows what Farber calls “the gestures of theatre to fill in the soul of the story”: symbolic images or props, considered movement and specific lighting or sounds.

As with all of Farber’s testimonial work, Nirbhaya was written in close collaboration with the actresses whose stories the play tells. “I ask many, many questions,” the playwright explains. “I provoke their memories by asking about songs, smells and sounds. I gather a lot of material on each person and then I distil it down.” The stories may not be hers, but she is the writer of the words spoken on stage. It’s a creative method she likens to the therapeutic process and indeed, the term “talking cure” springs to mind. “Memory is very random, very chaotic,” Farber says, “so I’m there to construct the narrative.” She then goes on to compare her writing process to that of an archaeologist “scraping away at the layers” of her subjects’ memories, “finding the bones and piecing them together” – the same analogy used by Freud to describe his psychoanalytic work with patients who had suffered trauma.

What makes Nirbhaya so potent – the entire audience rose in a standing ovation the night I was there, and messages left outside the theatre and on Twitter and Facebook all speak of people being powerfully affected by the experience – is its unique mixture of testimonial, transformation and protest.

“It’s civil war,” Farber says about India’s horrifying sexual abuse statistics, without any shadow of the dramatic. “It’s fellow citizens turning on each other and there is a blanket of silence around it.” Thus the play is about both bearing witness and laying claim to the events of the past – as was the case with Amajuba, Woman in Waiting and He Left Quietly – but doing so in order to mount a movement of change; in this sense the play is also a scream of protest. This might be a new facet of Farber’s work, but it’s clearly something that lies in her background as she recalls watching protest theatre as a teenager in South Africa in the 1980s, speaking of it in similar terms to the political and social context of Nirbhaya: “We were in the midst of this incredible and pervasive silence and people were trying to bust through that with their narratives. I watched people literally trying to wake us up on that stage.”

The immediacy and the closeness of the communication that happens in the theatre space is central to Farber’s manifesto. “Theatre,” she says, “is a very humble endeavour.” It’s not about recording a moment on film that’s then stored and watched by millions, it’s urgent in its directness and fleeting nature. “Night by night, 100 people at a time, you create a transmission that, if it’s done well, is beyond the capacity of any other art form I know.” She takes, for example, the meaning of acting extremely literally – actors are people who take action. “I don’t think the word ‘act’ is to pretend. “I think I’ve been profoundly rocked by theatre maybe two or three times in my life, but I make theatre in order to emulate those moments that shaped me.”

The other body of Farber’s work is adaptations – she used Sophocles’ ancient Greek Theban Plays as a lens through which to examine leadership, accountability and the nature of democracy in the foreign policy of a contemporary superpower in Kadmos; Molora was a radical adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy in the context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Sezar transposed Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to contemporary Africa; as did her last production, Mies Julie, a South African-set adaptation of Strindberg. She’s keen to return to Shakespeare again in the future in the form of a Middle East-set adaptation of King Lear that hinges on the idea of the ownership of land – one in which Lear is the head of a post-genocidal community and thus the legacy he’s so desperate to pass on to his daughters isn’t simply his kingdom but a homeland he believes is his by ancient right. But his daughter Cordelia can’t see it as anything but occupied territory and thus not hers to inherit.

These issues – basic human rights, the ownership of the body and the ownership of land – are those Farber returns to over and over again. Essentially, she says, her work is about “the messy struggle of what it is to be human and how we’re all just desperately trying to get a foothold in some certainty in this existence, and the damage we do to each other inside that”.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.