Anupama Chandrasekhar

“A woman playwright’s job and skill-set are the same as a male playwright’s. Yet I’m aware that fewer female playwrights are staged compared to men - in India, and perhaps across the world. There are fewer women directors in my country than men, and hardly any governmental support to theatre. Both contribute to this unhealthy gender imbalance…”

“There’s a charge and immediacy to theatre that I don’t find in any other medium. It’s an artform in the present tense, a medium tailor-made to explore the world you live in NOW…”

“It was not a one-off incident. It has happened over and over again since, and has just become more gory, more brutal. But you can sense the media fatigue around the reporting of crimes against women. If it happens outside of the cities, it’s just another incident. The candlelit vigils don’t happen for women in small towns and villages.”

“I have been asked so many times, mostly by men, ‘Why don’t you write comedies, or plays that celebrate India?’…I tell them: on the day that these things don’t happen any more, I will happily start writing bedroom farces.”