The wooden playhouse of Akshara Theatre lent the play I Am Venus a classic feel while the choice of the play itself indicated that the perceptions of sex, gender, power and identity have remained static even in current times
The challenge of presenting an oft-staged play, especially one that has been tried by Broadway greats, is that you run the risk of comparative interpretation. But Anasuya Vaidya’s rendition of I am Venus, a take on the classic Venus in Furs, was a brave, taut and a relevant presentation of an erotic battle of the sexes, one that holds forth in Delhi as much as it does in New York.
The story begins at the end of a long rainy day of casting that has left Thomas, a play director, without an actress for his adaptation of Venus in Furs, the cult 1870 novel by Austrian author leopold von Sacher-Masoch, after whom the word “masochism” was coined. He wants his heroine to be a “sexy-slash-articulate young woman with some classical training and a particle of brain in her skull,” a rather pared down version of an intelligent actress. At this despondent moment and amid thunder and lightning, a street-smart, brash aspirant barges into his studio. Drenched and harried by the hostile weather and a demanding life, Wanda pleads with Thomas to let her read for the part despite having arrived after everyone has gone home. Dressed as she is like a hooker on Sunset Boulevard, Thomas wants out but the woman won’t take no for an answer. Sharing a similar name as the woman protagonist, she believes she can do justice to the role.
Thomas gives in, sure that he could dismiss her easily, judging her to be a floozy of sorts. But Wanda has come prepared. Not only does she pull out the costumes from her voluminous bag, she becomes the character — a poised, independent and self-possessed young woman, an aristocratic countess Vanda no less with all refinements who has Thomas completely in thrall. The two begin reading the play with Thomas taking on the role of Herr Kushemski. He’s a dilettante poet with a weakness for fur that stems from a regal aunt who once beat him when he was a boy while he was stretched out on her black fox coat. Whiplashed by a dominatrix aunt, it had left a scar so deep that Kushemski believes in supplicating himself to a woman and be tormented by her transgressions, thereby punishing himself and writhing in the unreleased pain of his childhood. He turns Vanda into his all-powerful mistress, one who would leash him to herself with a dog collar and tie him up with her stockings to a four poster bed. It is in this play within a play format that Wanda, the actress, wreaks her vengeance.
She overturns Thomas’ assumptions of herself as a frivolous wannabe and shows that not only has she read the novel and observed the director’s liberties and scene recreations, she even manipulates his thinking in the play within a play, becoming the dominatrix that her character has invested her with. The original playwright, David Ives, has skillfully entwined Thomas’ budding relationship with Wanda with the mystery and intrigue of Kushemski and Vanda’s unusual sexual bond. The two characters even attempt a role reversal of sorts while rehearsing, Thomas becoming the experimental Vanda and Wanda Kushemski. You would expect this mirror image tactic to bring about an equilibrium in the ever changing power dynamics between men and women, directors and actors. But that is not to be. For Thomas, as a director, reduces the haughty countess to a pleading mendicant of Kushemski in his play. And Wanda, the actress, challenges the director for assuming a cliched taming of the shrew tactic. She bursts forth, an angry Venus, an Aphrodite, in full fury against societal expectations and the male gaze.
The stage is a perfect medium for the investigation of this kind of fantasy role-playing and kudos to the actors, Nisha Shetty in particular, for switching between two extreme modes effortlessly during the performance and blending them powerfully in the end. The wooden playhouse of Akshara Theatre lent the play a classic feel while the choice of the play itself indicated that the perceptions of sex, gender, power and identity have remained static even in current times. The sound effects and lighting lent ably to the performances, particularly the whipping sound, which was chillingly the tool of the tormentor and evoked the wince of the tormented. Involving and intense.