When women play men

Eugenio Barba, the celebrated Italian theatre director, has often encouraged an acting ethic that is based on the complementarity of feminine and masculine energies. He has taken forward the archetypes of the animus (the masculine subconscious of a woman) and the anima (the feminine subconscious of a man) as postulated by Carl Jung and applied it to actors’ training, preserving the balance between these poles.

During Barba’s stint in Kerala in 1963, a visit that has passed into folklore in Indian theatre circles, the traditional form of Kathakali, with its stylized but expressive gestures, made a lasting impression on him. In such practices, he observed how performers took on masculine and feminine roles and this potent coalescing of energies in an actor’s body influenced the training methodologies he evolved.

Ironically, like many classical theatre forms in India, Kathakali has been an enduring bastion of male agency and it is only very recently that female troupes have entered its cultural landscape. From the yakshagana folk theatre in coastal Karnataka to the devotional bhaona in Assam, we have a long history of theatrical female impersonation. Cross-dressing male actors like Bal Gandharva, Chapal Bhaduri and Jayashankar Sundari became the graceful pillars of the Marathi sangeet natak, Bengali jatra and Gujarati bhavai theatre, respectively. Lauded for having touched the very essence of womanhood, they also constructed an archetypal hyper-femininity for the stage, even as female actors themselves were slowly becoming more and more ubiquitous. Female performers taking on male parts have been mere blips on the horizon, but in contemporary theatre, a season of reversal can now be observed, with more women channelizing their inner animus to create a masculinity that is entirely their own.

A new play with a tantalizing premise sits on the very cusp of these explorations. Anuja Ghosalkar has written and directed Lady Anandi, based on her great-grandfather, Madhavrao Tipnis, a female impersonator in late 19th century Marathi theatre. It was a script that she developed during a residency at Sweden’s Art Lab Gnesta, a centre that marries theatre with anthropology. It has invariably been staged as a work-in-progress—part performance, part lecture-demonstration.

Sporadically, Ghosalkar dips into Tipnis’ persona and that of Lady Anandi, his most famous part. At other times, she reads out from research material. At one point, she projects an archival photograph of a bejewelled Tipnis in full regalia on her own body. “It allowed me to juxtapose my own relative lack of femininity with that of this resplendent creation of my great-grandfather,” she says. “I can never hold the pallu with such grace. There is definitely a dissonance here.”

Backstage, within the play, when Tipnis takes off his wig, Ghosalkar can now give space to the masculinity he has been suppressing. “It is much more organic for me to play him as simply a man, because I don’t carry the same distinctions of gender that he may have held in his time,” she says. In an early staging of the piece, a male actor played Tipnis, but she felt that the nuances of his characterization needed a different treatment, best depicted by her.

This is echoed in director Atul Tiwari’s decision to cast a female actor, Devina Medda, in the part of Wajid Ali Shah in the play Taoos Chaman Ki Myna. As is widely known, the nawab was a man very much in touch with his feminine side, but casting a man in the part would have impaired that quality. “Male actors invariably bring in stereotypical tics, which would have turned him into a caricature,” says the play’s producer, Shaili Sathyu. In Akshayambara, Sharanya Ramprakash took on the part of a Kaurava warrior opposite a Draupadi performed by a man (Prasad Cherkady). She was able to juxtapose Cherkady’s representation of Draupadi as a stock figure against her more politicized take as the belligerent male. This certainly took her on an interesting journey during the making of the play.

“What we have done with the play, is not to masculinize me, but to bring out the abhinaya (emotion) of the Kaurava’s arrogance, his idea of ownership, within my female framework,” she says. Actor-director Faezeh Jalali has announced auditions for her next venture, based on the warrior from the Mahabharat, Shikhandi, who was born a woman, and later imparted the strength and masculine attributes of a forest spirit. This cross-gender exploration certainly presents immense thematic possibilities. It is strange that in television or film, Shikandi has always been cast as an effeminate man, rather than one of the great war’s most able warriors.

There is a conflict inherent in these portrayals, which is perhaps due to masculinity being linked closely to patriarchal attitudes that have traditionally oppressed the female and the feminine. The performers who find themselves negotiating these parts appear to offset this conflict in part with subversive humour. This is certainly true of another kind of stage performance—the stand-up comic routine.

Vasu Primlani, a Bengaluru-based stand-up comic, sometimes assumes a sexist male persona during her routine. The misogyny is not threatening to her female audiences. In a way, she is lampooning what is ugly and undesirable in men. We see this again in the traditional Sangeet Bari, where lavani doyenne Shakuntala Nagarkar puts on a Gandhi topi and jacket, and turns into one of her own boorish clients, to great comedic effect. Jyoti Dogra in Notes On Chai gives us crotch-scratching men with little or no delicacy in their dealings, and Geetanjali Kulkarni’s Viola in Piya Behrupiya is all swagger and churlishness. It’s the woman inside that gives the part its gravitas.

Yet, it is important to point out that masculinity in itself need not be abusive or bullying or steeped in patriarchy. Such gender-bending performances sometimes also reveal an admiration for masculinity as something aspirational. The converse is true as well, in the case of those (men and women both) who idealize femininity and brook no respect to the parochial conditioning that gives it a pejorative colouring. “When I put on a moustache and flex my forearm in Lady Anandi, I thoroughly enjoy myself. It is ironic in a sense but I do enjoy the stance, and the power,” says Ghosalkar. Part of this is linked with the sheer exuberance of role-playing that is ingrained in actors. It can be reduced, or elevated even, to just the state of being within the male body and what that entails. As Barba puts it, the actor’s body is not male or female in and of itself.

In any case, these explorations also enable us to see female practitioners in a different light, in which they are not suffused with their own femininity, but are able to translate and deliver universality in a way their male colleagues have always been given more credit for.