No Rest in the Kingdom , a black comedy by Deepika Arwind, tells about how women deal with misogyny in their daily lives. The performance looks at the female performer’s body as a site of protest.
The play, a powerful one-woman physical theatre, performed at the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFoK) on Saturday, draws from the lives of urban characters who speak similar languages of consumerism and technology.
Daily annoyances
It deals with daily annoyances of being a woman in the country.
Masculinity in South Asia, especially India, is asserted and celebrated widely, says Deepika. “Its conventional manifestations are varied and dangerous, infecting different aspects of everyday life. Whether through the perpetration of rape culture in cinema and politics, or the palpable anxiety of the female body on the street, masculinity occupies oppressively large spaces, literally and figuratively,” she says.
Subverting masculinity
No Rest in the Kingdom has been created out of the desire to embody and subvert expressions of this masculinity through the body of a female performer, she says.
The kingdom is the current society where we live, where women are subjected to daily discrimination and violence.
Blurring the boundaries of genders, the actor embodies a variety of characters — male, female and feline — representing a gender and inter-species fluidity. The cat is a powerful motif that runs through the play.
How might her body, alone and vulnerable, serve as a metaphor for gender insensitivity and antagonism? How can her body transform into multiple sites of protest and how can humour, irreverence, and playfulness become her primary weapons of dissent and opposition?
This show has travelled to find resonance in different countries because its characters are archetypes of ‘masculinity’ familiar across cultures.
The play causes discomfort, sometimes scepticism. It breeds introspection and provokes conversations, Deepika says.
She avoids clichés, does not preach. But the play holds a mirror to the audience.
The characters she portrays sent the audience to howls of laughter.
But for every woman in the audience, there were scenes that they can identify deeply with. The play is produced by Sandbox Collective.
