Ruks Khandagale is an actress whose work bridges classical material and modern sensibilities. Prior parts documented her training, notable roles, and earlier engagements with Shakespeare — highlighting an interest in reimagining gender, culture, and language within canonical texts.
A unique layer of Shakespeare Part 21 is its infusion of Indian classical performance theories. Khandagale, a student of the Natya Shastra (the ancient Indian treatise on performing arts), applies the concept of Bhava (emotional state) and Rasa (aesthetic flavor) to Shakespearean tragedy.
Where a Western actress might externalize Ophelia’s madness through tears and torn garments, Khandagale internalizes it using the Sattvika (spiritual-emotional) technique—subtle tremors, a change in skin pallor, a stillness that is more terrifying than screaming. actress ruks khandagale and shakespeare part 21
In Part 21’s interpretation of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, she delivers it not as Hamlet, but as Gertrude hearing it through a wall. The meaning shifts entirely. "To die, to sleep," becomes not a philosophical musing on suicide, but a mother’s desperate prayer for her son to simply stop self-destructing. It is a reclamation of maternal grief that the original text denies us.
What happens after Part 21? Ruks Khandagale has announced that she will take a two-year hiatus from Shakespeare to focus on directing a film adaptation of Part 15 (her acclaimed version of King Lear told from the perspective of the Fool’s forgotten sister). But she promises that the conversation is not over. Ruks Khandagale is an actress whose work bridges
“Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets,” she says. “I have 21 arguments. The math doesn’t lie. We have 21 more rounds to go.”
Ruks Khandagale (38), who rose to fame with her National Award-nominated performance in the indie film Fado: The Echo of Dying Walls, has always been a "theatre animal." Critics often describe her as "the weaponized introvert"—someone who uses silence as a sword. Khandagale, a student of the Natya Shastra (the
In Part 21, Khandagale does something unprecedented. She enters the stage not in Elizabethan garb, but in a deconstructed saffron sari draped over a contemporary lawyer’s blazer. The set is minimalist: a single oak desk, a broken hourglass, and a mirror that reflects not the audience, but a recorded video of Khandagale herself, playing the ghost of Shakespeare.
“I am not trying to ‘do’ Shakespeare,” Khandagale said in a recent post-show interview. “I am trying to argue with him. Part 21 is my final letter to a dead white man. It is an apology, a lawsuit, and a love letter, all at once.”