Fearless women break the silence

Nirbhaya, Grange Theatre, Oldham

When a young woman was brutally gang-raped in Delhi in 2012, the world watched and listened to the news outraged.

What followed was even more harrowing - namely the countless women who broke the silence to reveal this wasn’t an exception but the norm.

Nirbhaya marries real-life testimonies with a dramatised recreation of what happened to Jyoti Singh Pandey, the 23-year-old student the media dubbed “Nirbhaya” - fearless.

Internationally-acclaimed playwright and director Yael Farber brings a blistering evocation of that terrible night and the ripples of change it set in motion. Presented by the Southbank Centre, the play is at Oldham’s Grange Theatre (ending tonight) as part of the Alchemy Festival 2015.

Priyanka Bose, Poorna Jagannathan, Sneha Jawale and Pamela Sinha describe their bodies as no longer being their own as we witness the daily harassment and groping in the bustling streets of a city littered with the relics of lost empires, a city now described as “hell on earth for women”.

The play uses the rape and death of Jyoti Singh Pandey as a catalyst to break the silence around sexual violence.

The women, too, are fearless, as each tells her story. In a culture where the fear of shame can be overpowering, breaking the silence is a courageous act. Too often women are told that they should stay at home, where they would be much safer. What would they say to Sinha, a Canadian actress of Indian heritage, who was raped in Toronto 20 years ago by a stranger who broke into her apartment? Or to Bose, who was raped by several men working in her family home?

Nirbhaya is not an easy watch and nor should it be. Prepare to be shocked, horrified, and bring plenty of tissues. The silence of the audience was punctuated by sniffs and sobs.

While the men who raped and killed Jyoti Pandey were charged and convicted, the men who abused the women in the play got away with their crimes.

Nirbhaya ends with each woman standing up, saying her name and slowly raising a fist in the air.

They are no longer broken women ashamed of their bodies or what has happened to them. They are fearless. They are Nirbhaya.

boxoffice@coliseum.org.uk.