The debut theatre show from comedian Anu Vaidyanathan is her story of being a south Indian immigrant who has lost her co-ordinates and her language, and of finally learning it's time to ask for help. Menagerie talks about modern motherhood, being a migrant, and being a south Indian married to a north Indian, her diametric opposite in waistline, temper and sageliness. Like Noah's Ark taking the best pair of every species, Menagerie unpicks the best of each season of life: of work, of marriage, of having kids, and sets the creation of an individual value system in context. A woman who never stops, Anu has a PhD in Electrical Engineering, was the first Asian to finish an Ultraman (10km swim, 420km bike ride, 84.4km run), has published a book, made her first film 6 months post-partum, and debuted her comedy hour BC:AD – Before Children, After Diapers in 2022. As she tries to unite head and heart, her engineer with her artist, whilst also dealing with an endless schedule of her children's dandruff treatment and her own, she faces up to a traumatic moment that made her realise that mental health is not, as she has been brought up to believe, something to dismiss or make light of.
Anu will be performing Menagerie directly after her comedy show BC:AD – Before Children, After Diapers (15.40 – 16.40) in the same venue.
Anu Vaidyanathan said, “I was born in New Delhi and raised in Bangalore by parents who treated my brother and me equally. My father was fiercely proud and supportive of my mother's career which she had to fight for in her own parental home. Both of them invested in their children's education and embodied existentialism by doing – which was a natural catalyst to anything I pursued. My parents are my role models in many ways. But their generation, from pre-independent India, did not believe mental health to be an issue.
“When I started writing Menagerie, I was trying to catharise an unexpected assault I was subject to. I tried to joke about it but, it didn't really work. There were as many aspects of darkness as there were of light with the only respite being in the writing itself. My own bias made me arrive at asking for help for mental health as a very last resort. But on that road, I learned that being unmoored as an immigrant is sometimes a gift and that situating the way we live in modern times is made doubly difficult by technology. So, this piece became theatrical because the pauses seemed as important as the movements and I can safely say, I am so glad I am not afraid to tell it like it is. I would want my audiences to take away the fact that despite parenting being an endurance sport, it creates a butterfly effect whose impact lasts beyond one's lifetime.”
Anu Vaidyanathan is a comedian, filmmaker, sometime triathlete and now theatremaker. In 2016 she published her book Anywhere But Home: Adventures In Endurance, and her short films include Split, Skiff, Baffle and Spelunking. She made her Edinburgh debut as a comedian in 2022 with BC:AD – Before Children, After Diapers and returned last year with Blimp, which was converted into a screenplay titled Mis(s)chief, starring Carlos Bardem.
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