Shakespeare was not the first to say it but he said it well: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.” Yet when dramatists attempt to blur the lines between stage and contemporary life, literally staging reality, it remains for many a taboo. The stage is in many ways an expression of society, a blank canvas on which the stories we tell to each other are actualised. Current events feed into theatre; writers are shaped by the world around them, so why are people still so scared of the stage?

Shakespeare’s early successes were history plays. Aeschylus in ancient Greece used his own involvement in the Persian war as creative fuel. It’s normal now to relocate scripts from the Renaissance to the present: last week in Cambridge alone saw Faustus donning a Cambridge scarf and Bacchanalian ancients appearing in the London riots. There’s a reason that contemporary adaptations continually occur. The stories theatre tells remain relevant even today as plays quite literally speak out to people.

At this year’s Edinburgh Fringe I was lucky to see Nirbyhah, a play that not only talks about current events, but is itself formed by them. This was acted by a group of abused women who refused to remain silent, reacting against the Delhi gang rape in 2012, each with their own story to share. The play, for me, shattered any illusion that reality and the stage are disconnected.

I had never been in a theatre where an audience collectively cried, where the stage screamed out at the world not merely because it moved, but because the events it showed us were a reflection of a reality that stood before us.

At times no longer performance, it was instead as if we had stumbled into a confessional. From the safety of that space, the words spoken by women still bearing the scars of the events they recounted rang out with more power than any documentary or interview. The power of Nirbyhah is that the line between reality and theatricality is at the thinnest point it’s ever been.

Theatre has always been a form of instruction, from the mystery and morality plays to Dennis Kelly’s Faustus-esque George Mastromas at the Royal Court this year. Staging current events is a notoriously tricky business, a reason why fiction often provides a welcome shield, where writers can tackle issues head on without technically talking about them at all. Yet many plays performed even here in Cambridge have openly depicted real events in contemporary society: political feuds, crime scenes, economic crashes, celebrity scandals, real life drama.

Nirbyhah has taught me that theatre can be a form of protest that reaches beyond the stage. As well as being inspired by contemporary events, theatre can participate in them, acting as a forceful agent for change, where people can ‘act’ in more ways than one.

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