Macbeth Play Review Essay

Maintaining a balance between the demands of the plot of Macbeth and the complex idea of hijra is finely executed in Verma’s adaptation. In her online review of the production, Chaudhry identified her own British Asian identity within the play: ‘the multi layered and sometimes disjointed and complex lives of British Asians’ are ‘perfectly injected’ into the play (Chaudhry 2015). ‘My life is full of strangeness and eccentricities, so the bearded hijras made perfect sense to me and the entire production made sense of the nonsensical’ (Chaudhry 2015). Chaudhry considers that Tara Arts’ production could represent the British Asian community in Britain. By employing hijras as witches, Verma enters into the conflict within the British Asian family

The comedy, in what is usually a dark introduction, immediately tells us that the Macbeth we know is going to be challenged through this performance on stage and is going to be given a new light. (Bowen 2015)
Though Bowen highlights the comic complexity here in Verma’s adaptation, his view also posits a challenge that “runs counter to the ideas of connoisseurs of the original” (Nicklas and Oliver 2012, 2). By employing hijras, Verma enriches the idea that the “cultural capital of canonized works” such as Macbeth can be brought into an animated debate about our valuing of the ‘original’ and of ‘adaptation’, and makes explicit the transformation of syntactical meaning that can be produced through changing the context in which the playworld is

The belief and disbelief in the existence of hijras' power and subjugation in South Asian societies varies extremely to both ends and Verma captures both ends of extremely within the text of Shakespeare's Macbeth. In this sense Verma’s Macbeth becomes a “multilaminated work” (Hutcheon, 2006, p. 7) which refers Shakespeare’s text as a departure point to cite the issues of third gender. With this renewed understanding of the adaptation of the existing dramatic texts, Verma's Macbeth re-presents a questioning of the canonical text and at the same time distances the text’s assumptions by positioning it in a different cultural context without altering the original. If William Shakespeare's Macbeth explores the politics of gender, then Verma’s production invests this politics to the third gender and third space. By such investment of ‘sharing stories’ (Hutcheon, 2006, p. 4) between two cultures, Verma translates third gender into the third space or inbetweenness. Haq (2015) locates such inbetweenness of hijras in “[B]eing neither here nor there in terms of sexual identity” (Haq 2015, 3). Such locating of hijras brings a parallel social hierarchical structure and politics of third space and identity within British South Asian theatre discourse. Verma’s transition from fictional witches to non-fictional realities of South Asian community brings a