Mitali Saran: Staged, finally

Walking out of Ficci auditorium in the wake of watching Nirbhaya - the highly acclaimed play that was conceived after the gruesome rape of a young woman in Delhi on December 16, 2012 - there was an awkward moment in which nobody said, "So what did you think?" That's because, as it turned out, several of us didn't think much of it. And this might be a good thing.

Since it premiered at the Edinburgh festival in August 2013, Nirbhaya has earned three awards and rave reviews. The Sunday Herald said: "this piece combines the presentation of unbearable facts with ingenious aesthetics in a manner so brilliant that it is, surely, one of the most powerful and urgent pieces of human rights theatre ever made." And yet, it is the prescient opening remark of The Guardian's review that comes closest: "There is so much emotion surrounding Yael Farber's Nirbhaya that it may be beyond criticism."

The sexual crime committed on December 16 turned the world's stomach and triggered a long-overdue public conversation about gender in India. Yet the play, which should have resonated loudest in Delhi, ground zero of that crime, felt disappointing and anachronistic.

In production terms, it's great. The sets and props are brilliantly minimalistic, with just a few metal bars, a few chairs, and a few lengths of fabric to evoke both beauty and squalor, the mythic and the personal. Lighting fills the rest of the space with a pure quality that feels like truth. Dynamic choreography allows a few people on a big stage to evoke a restless megalopolis and the press of bodies, as well as the inward, deeply private space of memory. Ethereal singing by Japjit Kaur, who plays Nirbhaya, is woven into the sound design. The personal stories of Poorna Jagannathan, Priyanka Bose, Sneha Jawale and Sapna Bhavnani, all real-life victims of abuse and violence, are disturbing and moving.

Why, then, did Nirbhaya leave me cold?

The women of the cast speak powerfully about their own experiences - not abstractly but with deeply personal testimonials, naming themselves and their parents. Breaking their own silence is commendable and necessary. But while this must be life-altering and cathartic for them, and while you applaud them and empathise greatly, the play leaves you asking: and what next?

Nirbhaya was written very close to the events of December 16, 2012, when Delhi as well as many other parts of India took the world - and itself - by surprise by exploding onto the streets to vent a long pent-up rage about endemic violence against women, and women's second-class status, in Indian society. At the time, the mere expression of rage was a new and significant thing. It ruptured a universal reluctance to declare war on such attitudes, inspiring editorials the world over, taking the lead in protesting what must be the largest unspoken lethal conflict globally. Indian women - and men - decided it was time to offload the poisonous burden of shame and to refuse, any longer, to blame the victim.

But here's the thing: India has, by now, been having this conversation for almost a year and a half. The media's effort to keep the issue alive meant we witnessed the outing, day after day, of what we know happens to women all over India. We have heard and read about a litany of rapes, gang rapes, beatings, burnings, beheadings, acid attacks, disembowellings, decapitations, mutilations, intimidations, discrimination, harassment, terrorisation - heartbreakingly much of it perpetrated upon minors. We all have, or know people who have, personal stories about the violation of body and spirit.

What Nirbhaya the play does not do is to go beyond cathartic rage into a region of greater nuance or complexity. None of the personal stories in this play, sadly, is out of the ordinary. (One imagines that Sneha Jawale's piece about being a dowry bride, with the burn scars to show for it, might seem morbidly exotic to non-Indian audiences, but in India she is a tragically familiar figure.)

In India, in other words, the conversation has moved beyond the facts of a story about gender violence, to examining the complexities of the social fabric, and searching for solutions. Breaking the silence is certainly part of the solution, but for a piece of theatre to offer only a few testimonials, after a year and a half of national soul-searching, seems somehow banal.

I don't for a moment belittle what the play does. I do, however, wonder why it can't be re-shaped to go beyond, as time passes, to address evolving issues of concern - like concepts of masculinity, or modernity, or individual rights, in the context of messy human relationships and India's social fabric.

Meanwhile, my nutshell review of Nirbhaya is: nice play, but it doesn't live up to the hype.