Context: Gupta, Empire and the World of the Play
A Play Built From Two True Stories
Tanika Gupta’s The Empress opens on a ship’s deck in 1887 and imagines two love stories that history barely recorded side by side: a fictional Bengali ayah and a fictional lascar, and the real, documented relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian servant Abdul Karim. The play cuts constantly between the two, forcing the audience to hold both worlds in mind at once — even though, as you will see, the two central women never actually meet.
Tanika Gupta and Why She Wrote It
Gupta was born in London the year after her parents arrived from Calcutta. Her great-uncle, Dinesh Gupta, was hanged in 1931 for an attack on the Writers’ Building in Calcutta — a family history of resistance to British rule that sits behind a play repeatedly asking what empire actually cost the people living inside it. Gupta was awarded an MBE for services to the Arts in 2009, and has written several other plays exploring India and Britain together, including a 2010 version of Great Expectations reset in India.
The Empress was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in the spring of 2013, directed by Emma Rice. Rice described the piece as a “big, sprawling, epic piece,” and said she thought hard about avoiding a costume-drama feel, aware of the risk of stereotyped exoticism that could undercut the play’s political force. The prescribed edition for this course is the Methuen Drama Student Edition, with commentary and notes by Jane Garnett.
The Empress was first performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2013, directed by Emma Rice. The play is set across the last fourteen years of Queen Victoria’s reign, 1887–1901, in two acts of fifteen short scenes each.
The World the Play Recreates: Ayahs and Lascars
An ayah travelled on a deck-class ticket, often rolling up her own mattress by day, and was frequently listed on a ship’s passenger list only by her employer’s name rather than her own. Reaching Britain was no guarantee of security: for many real ayahs, arrival could be the prelude to being dismissed the moment the family no longer needed her on land. Rani’s story in the play — hired for a voyage, then abandoned at the docks — reflects a documented pattern, not an invented cruelty.
Lascars were paid less than white sailors doing the same work and were often given the worst jobs on board, including stoking boilers, on the mistaken assumption that men from hotter countries could withstand the heat better. By 1914, lascars made up roughly seventeen and a half per cent of all sailors on British-registered ships. Hari sails for the Clan Line, whose crews had their own repertoire of mocking, sometimes obscene parody songs sung in a mixture of English and Hindustani — exactly the kind of song the play opens with.
A common mistake is to assume the ship’s harshest authority figure is British. The serang who bullies Hari throughout the play is himself Indian — he carries a bamboo laithi and enforces the Clan Line’s contract, answering to a system built by British shipping companies rather than acting as a British officer himself. Lascar Sally, who runs the rowdy boarding house where lascars drink and lodge, is based on a real Englishwoman, Sarah Graham, who kept a lodging house for seamen in Wapping, had an Indian partner and spoke fluent Hindi, exactly like the character in the play.
Ayahs and lascars were real, exploited members of the British Empire’s economy, not background colour. Ayahs cared for British children at sea, often listed only by their employer’s name; lascars were paid less, given the worst jobs, and by 1914 made up around seventeen and a half per cent of sailors on British-registered ships.
Two Parallel Love Stories, One Divided Stage
The commentary describes the play as “structured around two parallel love stories”: Rani and Hari on one side, Victoria and Abdul Karim on the other. Both strands begin in 1887, the year of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, and run across the empire’s final Victorian decades, through the 1897 Diamond Jubilee, to Victoria’s death in 1901. The action cuts between the ship and the docks on one side and the royal residences on the other, so the audience is always aware of both worlds existing at the same historical moment.
No. The commentary is explicit: “They will never meet.” The closest the play comes is a single stage direction late in the play where Rani sees Victoria at a distance during the Diamond Jubilee procession — Victoria does not see her back. This gap is deliberate: setting the two women’s stories side by side without ever letting them touch is, according to the commentary, the spine of the play. Never write an answer that stages a meeting between them.
Designing Empire: Why Context Shapes the Stage
Because Gupta’s structure keeps two worlds apart without ever merging them, design has to do some of the work the plot does not. In the 2013 RSC production, black-and-white film — including archive footage of the Jubilee procession and the sea — was projected onto a canvas and gauze screen, creating scale and movement as a backdrop to smaller, more jewelled scenes staged on platforms at different levels. The commentary describes the effect: “Britain was symbolically presented as a tiny island in a heaving and billowing imperial sea.” Colour was used to heighten the contrast between Rani’s world and the Queen’s.
This is exactly the kind of thinking the compulsory design-and-context question rewards. A strong answer names the choice: for example, projecting monochrome archive-style footage of ships and crowds onto an upstage gauze, while lighting a small, warmly lit platform downstage for Rani, so the audience physically feels the scale of empire pressing down on one individual life — a directorial idea built directly from the play’s historical setting, not decoration added afterwards.