What happens when Hamlet is a woman, and the ghost asks her not to take revenge? In A Woman Or Not To Be, staged by Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Art Research, Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy is reimagined as a feminist inquiry into rage, restraint, and the politics of being heard. The princess at its centre is trained in martial arts, but taut with grief, yet urged toward stillness rather than bloodshed. The familiar engine of revenge sputters before it can begin.
Premiering at Rangashankara in Bengaluru, the play is about Princess Hamlet suspecting her father and aunt of her mother’s murder. Here, its the mother’s ghost, not the father’s, that interrupts to end the cycle of violence. The shift exposes a fault line: if revenge has been canonised as a tragic destiny for men, what does it become for women? Hysteria? A moral failure? The play refuses to decide for us.
Nimmy Raphel’s Princess Hamlet moves with controlled ferocity. “I worked on my body language, which is slightly masculine yet vulnerable, it was challenging to inhabit,” she says.
Minimalist sets strip away spectacle; evocative lighting and music track the character’s inner weather. Vinay Kumar, writer-director, that he challenges the romance of the original Hamlet’s brooding: a privileged male’s self-destruction is lionised, he argues, while the same behaviour in a woman would be dismissed as lunacy. “It exposes how unfair gender expectations hide behind misogyny, grand literature, and poetic rhetoric,” he says.
The final image lingers: a woman who refuses the inheritance of violence, standing between fury and freedom. The question remains suspended to be, or not to be—and who gets to decide.