A play about the 2012 Delhi rape was never going to be easy viewing and unsurprisingly Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya is painful to watch. It’s easy to close a newspaper when details are too graphic or flick a TV channel when the news becomes unbearable. But this performance is painful because it confronts the most difficult of truths in the most gritty detail. And we, as the audience in the stifling intimacy of the Southbank’s Purcell Room, were unable to look away.
Conceived by Indian actress Poorna Jagannathan and scripted by South African playwright Yael Farber, Nirbhaya is currently being performed in London as part of the Women of the Word festival at the Southbank Centre. The play tells the story of the gang rape of student Jyoti Singh Pandey in December 2012 which provoked national and global outrage.
The play sets itself a tough task.
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