Woman Business
Written and performed by Shilipa Varma
Directed by Frances Bodiam
Star rating: 3.5
This is a pleasing one-woman show telling the story of Diya’s life from the traditional India of her childhood through a long successful London marriage, two children and finally back to India, a care home and a hint of dementia. Through all this we see the feisty rebellious streak in this highly articulate woman determined to be a writer but also seeking ways of reconciling her native culture with modern life. Indirectly we meet her parents, her husband, adult children and various other people. There’s humour, ruefulness and an occasional atmospheric foray into poetry.
Varma is a compelling actor to watch. She captures all the argumentative spiritedness of an exuberant twelve year old, astonished by, and cross about, this “women business” (menstruation) and the silly rules which accompany it. She has unusually expressive eyes and uses them eloquently. Then we see her suddenly 20 years older looking back on the beginning of her marriage. She shifts forward again and she’s facing widowhood, bereft but still sardonically funny and she listens, for example, to the “auntie” in the white sari who comes at her with “an arsenal of widowhood wisdom”. She listens and then says firmly that she’ll make her own rules. We’re hearing the thoughts she doesn’t actually voice to those around her especially her not very easy adult children and the carer she refers to as “the I’m-there-for-you-nurse” who always speaks in the first person plural, as she nears the end of her life.
The set is masterly in its simplicity. A series of colourful satin fabric lengths are pegged on an upstage, surrounding washing line. These become saris and shawls for different occasions and a white one represents her husband’s deathbed.
Woman Business is a gently moving 60 minutes of well-acted theatre. And sometimes it’s laugh aloud funny. It had never occurred to me that coffins or shrouded bodies passing into the crematorium furnace resemble pizzas disappearing into a pizza oven but as an observation it’s spot on.
