Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): A Hindi adaptation of ‘A Woman Alone’ penned by Nobel Prize-winning Italian playwright Dario Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, in the 1970s, was staged at Shaheed Bhawan in the city on Wednesday evening.
Directed and acted by Samriddhi Asati, the one-hour solo play ‘Akeli Aurat’ was rendered into Hindi by Himanshu Joshi for the first time under the guidance of Shobha Chatterji. It depicts the agony of women and also a bold description of marital rape and female subjugation. It also tells about the attitude towards women in society.
The woman tells what kinds of men have entered her life and what she has felt because of their behaviour. In the play, how an independent woman is considered a mere object of luxury by the anti-social elements of the society.
It is the saga of a homemaker locked inside her house by her suspicious husband. Yet, she goes about her daily chores—taking care of her baby, looking after her perverted, bed-ridden brother-in-law, dealing with dirty phone calls, fighting with a peeping tom and so on—without any fuss.
But her monotonous daily life takes a toll and slowly drives her mad. It is then that she starts talking to a neighbour, who has just moved into the apartment next door. As she bares her heart to the stranger, she realises that she has a choice to relieve herself of all the pain by taking her life.
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