Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India, 1979 Onwards by A. Mangai (review)

Written under the pseudonym A. Mangai, Dr. V. Padma's Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India, 1979 Onwards is thoughtful, enlightening, wide-ranging, and ambitious in its reach — both across time and the geographies of India from the late 1970s to the present day. Mangai is a writer whose work crosses the practical world of theatre — she was a founding member of a number of Tamil theatre groups in the 1980s, including Palkalai Arangam and Marrappachi — and academia. Thus, her mission to cover such a huge range of cultural contexts, practices, and iterations of questions and issues around representations of gender is informed by the experience and tacit, embedded knowledge of a woman who has been part of a mass transformative movement of theatre-making and activism in India for over 30 years.

The book is driven by the conviction that an exploration of the intersections of gender and theatre is central to any exploration of caste, faith, nation, and race in performance and dramatic text more generally, and in the analysis of developments in Indian theatre at the tail of the 20th century more specifically. Mangai observes that the attempt to "construct a monolithic history of performing arts in the vast geographical space that is India" (17) is problematic. Such a mission does not have the capacity to reflect the experience of theatre in India as a whole, both in terms of those who make it and those for whom it is made. Here the "stubborn category of the 'nation'" (18) and the use of the term "modern" to distinguish practices both from each other and from India's colonial past is problematized. She also notes the centrality of caste and of the plurality of languages and their impact on any consideration of both the histories and aesthetics of Indian theatres. Mangai takes the reader through key extant scholarly works on women and theatre and suggests rather more agency in women's use of the "volatile space of theatre" (23) than previous works — largely focused on plays or playwrights rather than, for example, theatre-makers and groups — have done. Her fluid movement between the analysis of more academic and literary works, and those that document the practice and achievements of practitioners and groups, is impressive. Equally notable is the welcome lack of reliance on theoretical jargon around gender and representation, the absence of which creates more opportunity for a broader and richer analysis over all.

The book is divided into familiar thematic frameworks, such as "Revisiting Myth," "Staging History," and "Negotiations with Classical Texts"; as well as chapters on "Female Impersonations," "Women Performers," and "Victimhood to Dignity." Chapters focused on plays and playwrights are less vibrant than those where Mangai concentrates more on works in terms of process and in performance. Here we have a welcome opportunity to explore the work of activist performers and street theatre groups whose practice has transformed the rep-resentations of gender in Indian theatre over the last 20 or so years. Mangai carefully navigates the relationship between traditional performance forms and their development through recent theatre projects, as well as teasing out the key differences in regional practices, and political histories of the relationship of gender to theatre. She notes that there are regional as well as temporal variations in the historicizing of the work of women performers and directors and presents these within a materialist framework.

Compositionally the book moves between historical contextualization and the documentation of work, both vertically in terms of the given themes of each chapter, and horizontally in terms of covering as much and as broad a range of material as possible. At times, there is close critical analysis of single or multiple works by an individual playwright or by a particular theatre group. Mangai brings both her powers of considered academic critique and her practical knowledge and professional experience to the analyses of these works, and of those in which she...