She walks onto the stage. No pretence, no paraphernalia, just a promise to tell an honest story. For the next forty minutes, she does what women, especially older women, are rarely allowed to do: take up space, demand attention, and gently insist that they must not become a memory while they are still writing their story.
Actor and theatre practitioner Sajitha Madathil’s Podcast Opera, a one-woman play staged recently in Kochi, rescues the ageing woman from the tired social script that reduces her to a grumpy granny, stuck in the waiting room of death.
When the performance begins, the character discusses her podcast and why she started one at this age. “The 60s are the second 30s, aren’t they? So we are still young, and this is the start of a new chapter, not the end of the good ones,” she says.
The protagonist then opens a small box, inside which, she says, rests her favourite pet. The moment you think she might pull out a floofy cat or a cuddly puppy from it, she simply slides the box open. “It is the wind. Wind is air, and air is breath. Come, meet my pet, the one who gives me life,” she smiles. And then, an old Ilayaraja melody plays in the background.
Sajitha’s protagonist is as quirky as she is melancholic, embodying a fullness long flattened by the male gaze across stage, screen, and literature.
“I have studied women’s lives across timelines in Kerala, and I feel that now, women are at the cusp of a reckoning. There is a gym I go to these days, and I was expecting myself to be the only older woman there. But there are so many others like me. It was a learning for me too, and it helped me change the way I approach my own ageing. I wanted Podcast Opera to encapsulate the sense of renewal I have been experiencing,” Sajitha says.
She explains that she expanded the thought in collaboration with Emil Madhavi, who co-wrote the script and directed the play.
Crafted for both large proscenium stages and intimate venues, Podcast Opera is divided into acts that feel like opening a memory box. An entire lifetime of womanhood comes alive through stories, backed by different layers of ambient sounds, rap music, vocals, and vintage film music, designed by Shaiju M.
If one episode of the performance opens with the protagonist recalling an all-consuming romantic affair, accompanied by the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack from Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love, in the next, she springs up with dumbbells in hand, dancing with absolute abandon.
Produced by Nazarudeen Valiyaveettil, Podcast Opera also features a fun rap song by Indulekha Warrier, about how the play’s protagonist is not the woman you imagine her to be.
Music is composed by Varkey, and choreography by Sreejith P. Ramya Suresh keeps the protagonist’s costume zestfully simple.
In the end, Podcast Opera does not ask us to look at an older woman alone. It asks every woman in the audience to look at herself. In a society that raises women on the prophecy that age will make them invisible, even useless, Sajitha Madathil offers another inheritance.
“I want the women watching to know that newer selves are waiting to be met,” she says.
Podcast Opera is currently on a performance tour across Australia and other countries. The performance will return to Kerala in the coming months.