“In the spicèd Indian air by night”: performing Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Postmillennial Kerala

This thesis examines the twenty-first-century intercultural performance of Shakespeare in Kerala, India. The thesis highlights Shakespeare’s function in invigorating local performing arts traditions that navigate tensions between paradigms of former feudalism, post-Independence democracy and capitalist globalisation. Throughout, individual artistic perspectives in interview illustrate local productions of \(Macbeth\) for indigenous Keralan performing art forms, ranging from the two-thousand-year old kutiyattam to contemporary postmodern Malayalam-language drama. My introduction contextualises these hybrid productions in their global, national, and local historiography, exploring intersections of the sacred, supernatural, and secular; postmodernism and rasa theory; intercultural Shakespeares and Keralan performing arts; and Shakespearean works with Indian literary and theatrical traditions from the colonial to the postmillennial era. Chapter One highlights cultural translation, focusing on kutiyattam artist Margi Madhu’s 2011 \(Macbeth\); Chapter Two discusses cultural collaboration, studying kathakali artist Ettumanoor P. Kannan’s \(Macbeth\) \(Cholliyattam\), 2013; Chapter Three considers cultural fusion, profiling Abhinaya Theatre’s experimental local-language production of \(Macbeth\), 2011. In closing, the thesis underscores the importance of giving a voice to Keralan theatre artists on Shakespeare, recognising the hitherto critically unexamined potential for the meeting point of two great dramatic cultural traditions as a forum, underpinned by residual colonial and Communist legacies, for intercultural discourse