Vagina Monologues at Oxford

Eve Ensler's 1996 play, Vagina Monologues, needs no introduction. Brought out as a series of monologues from women who talk about their experiences with their vaginas, the play has been adapted and performed countless times in over 75 countries. An adaptation was recently done by the students of St. Antony’s college at the University of Oxford. The performances were heartfelt and moving, despite the fact that these were students, not stage actors. And even though the auditorium itself was a make-shift one, it was well done and the play was performed to a packed audience.

While the subject of Vagina Monologues was itself significant enough to make it post worthy, the fact that one of the two drivers behind the play actually getting produced at Oxford is a contemporary Indian Woman in her own right was another one. Gayathry Venugopal, a Masters student at the college, hails from Kerala and was brought up in Uganda, where her family moved for work.

In a freewheeling conversation over coffee, we had an interesting discussion over what prompted her to take up the play and her take on specific aspects of Vagina Monologues.

In talking about how the idea of staging Vagina Monologues first came to her mind, she talks about how she had really enjoyed watching a performance of the same a number of years ago and it stayed with her. Funding from the college for the student play helped get the ball rolling, and soon she and her co-producer for the play were doing auditions for the roles. As someone who has been involved in theatre from an early age, and has even been trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Venugopal found the creative process involved in producing the play very energising. The fact that many talented women stepped forward to play various parts, helped in building a sense of community around it.

Venugopal does have one regret though – of not being able to get the participation needed from the trans community. Even though the play, by its very title, links womanhood to her physiology, at a time of increasing acceptance and awareness of gender fluidity; they were unable to get proper representation to play the part of a trans woman’s experience with vaginas.

The one facet of Vagina Monologues that has repeatedly come under criticism is that it indulges in a fair bit of male bashing. A number of female experiences in the play talk about their vaginas’ negative experiences with the opposite sex. Venugopal defends the play against this criticism by offering the explanation that the point of the play was to be provocative, which it needed to be, since it came out at a time when feminism was not as mainstream as it is today.

They play by itself has evolved overtime to include newer and fresher aspects to feminism, and there could be changes in its overall tonality going forward as well as feminism becomes an even more entrenched concept than it has become today. No matter, what though, the subject will continue to remain relevant. Perhaps it might even extend to the male counterpart!