Horrific fatal Delhi bus gang-rape inspires play by South African Yael Farber, now in Edinburgh Fringe Yael Farber, a playwright from Johannesburg, is staging play in Edinburgh Play is called Nirbhaya, Hindi for 'fearless', a name given to the victim Is a vehicle for five Indian victims of sexual abuse to tell their narratives Attack happened in December 2012 to a physiotherapy intern, 23 Woman was raped by six men, including bus driver, and left for dead She was taken to hospital in Singapore but died of her injuries Her boyfriend was also brutally attacked and left for dead When South African playwright Yael Farber read about the fatal gang-rape of a young female student on a Delhi bus in 2012, she was left profoundly disturbed - both as a person and a mother, but also as an artist. She felt a responsibility towards the victim, 23, who was left dead and unable to tell her story, and decided to do something about it. It began with a simple Facebook update. 'It's hard to define what exactly about this case grabbed everyone - there are just some cases that break through the endemic numbness we feel round these endemic stories,' Farber told MailOnline. It seemed this was a tipping point. I posted on Facebook how I felt about it and an actress from Mumbai, Poorna Jagannathan, contacted me and said you need to come here and break the silence of what has happened here. Performance: Two of the play's actresses - left, Poorna Jagnnathan, right, Priyanka Bose - performing in Nirbhaya Farber, who is from Johannesburg, travelled with her six-year-old daughter to Delhi and worked with Jagannathan on formulating a narrative for the savage attack that shocked the world. The resulting play - Nirbhaya, Hindi for 'fearless', a name given to the victim at the time by the media - uses the 2012 attack as 'the spine' of the narrative, but weaves around it the stories of five further Indian victims of sexual violence. 'We use the story of actual events - her rape and death - as the inciting incident,' Faber explained. 'It's the narrative spine that we use to frame all the other testimonies, and the idea is to give a living example on stage of breaking the silence. We relive her life and death but woven around that narrative are the five testimonies of the other women, a bit like an ancient Greek chorus. Faber: 'We use the story of actual events - her rape and death - as the inciting incident. It's the narrative spine that we use to frame all the other testimonies' What is, perhaps, most fascinating about Nirbhaya - and certainly what makes it so powerful - is that the performers themselves are the victims: each actor is narrating a version of her own story. Farber spent six months in Delhi with the women, getting to know them and finding the words with which to express what happened to them. They are her words, but they are their stories Three of the women are actually actors, the other two are not. Their assaults cover a range of sexual violence, from child abuse and rape, to marital rape, to a woman - and this is obvious from her burn scars - who was a dowry bride whose husband and brother-in-law set her on fire. And when she was recovering they left with her son and she never saw him again. They are her words, but they are their stories. Each 12-minute narrative is so powerful and so personal that audiences have been left completely speechless. A global crisis: Although the play is based upon sex attacks in India, Farber is keen to stress that the issue is not a localised one Speaking about why she felt the need to tell the stories of the murdered Delhi student, and to allow these women to tell theirs, Farber said: 'There is a mythology in all cultures - not just those of India and South Africa - that in crimes of rape the shame and loss of honour lies with the victim. The Delhi bus gang-rape On 16 December 2012 in Munirka, a southern New Delhi neighbourhood, a 23-year-old female physiotherapy intern was savagely beaten and gang raped by six men on a bus, including the driver. The woman had been at the cinema with a male companion, and both of them were knocked unconscious, thrown from the bus and left for dead. The woman died 13 days later while being treated in hospital in Singapore. The attack sparked mass public protests against the goverment's lack of protection for women in India, and specifically New Delhi. The six accused - the youngest of whom was 17 at the time of the attack - were arrested and charged with rape, murder, robbery, kidnapping and assault. sexual assault and murder. The driver, Ram Singh, was found hanged on 11 March 2013 in the Tihar Jail. His family suspect 'foul play'. And by victim I mean both women and men, because rape happens to men, too. It is not a feminist issue, it is a human rights issue. Rape is the one crime in which the victim is asked if they brought it on themselves. But the attack on the bus seemed to trigger a zeitgeist in Delhi that said we are no longer able to tolerate this lie that is being held in place by a patriarchal misogyny. 'By these women speaking out - as triggered by this horrific death - it's a gesture towards reclaiming one's narrative and the right to speak, and the idea if placing culpability where it belongs: with the attacker, not with the victim. The piece says, "Talk out, claim what happened to you as an event of your life so you can begin to move away from the myth that the perpetrator is not accountable and that you are." Although the play is based upon sex attacks in India, Farber is keen to stress that the issue is not a localised one. We have sex attack statistics in Johannesburg that equal those in Delhi - both have been named "the rape capital of the world" - but this is not an Indian or a South African crisis. It is a global one. The rape statistics are astonishingly high - and growing - in the UK and in America. There is something deeply out of kilter that needs to be addressed. The importance of the audience: 'Being witnessed is the most important aspect of telling a story: if you tell your story to a silent hall, you're still living in silence' The problem, Farber feels, is that we're all moving too fast. 'The question of why things are getting worse is complex, but it's a very anxious world, a world of tremendous shift and change all the time, and when there is a destabilising shift in society the most vulnerable members are always hit: usually children and women. We live in a very anxious world, a world of tremendous change, and when there is a destabilising shift in society the most vulnerable members are always hit: usually children and women. 'Commerce plays an enormous role: a woman's body has become so objectified - in that her legs are used to sell cars, her lips to sell food or beer - that there's a myth about what a woman actually is. And it's anything but an actual person. We grow men who are exposed to a constant range of images. And as the mother of a six-year-old girl, Farber is worried about the sort of place her daughter will be expected to take in the world. 'I see this onslaught of what she is exposed to,' she explains. Messages of how she will be seen. I feel such an urgency around this particular issue, and I think it is exacerbated by the fact I have a daughter, but ultimately I am a theatre-maker, and if I had a son I'd feel it too. 'I'd be desperate to raise a young man who didn't see women this way, who didn't support this idea that a woman will always be anything except herself.' Mother's concern: Playwright Yael Farber, who is worried about the sort of place her six-year-old daughter will be expected to take in the world if people don't speak out about sex crime The production also seems to act as a kind of therapy for the actors involved, allowing them to take ownership of their stories. 'We're still brand new, only eight or nine performances old,' said Farber. 'But the velocity with which it's happening is enormous. As we sit and talk as a company you see the power of what happens when the actors begin to take possession of their narratives. 'But it's not only the performers who are important to the claiming of the stories - the audience plays a crucial role. 'Being witnessed is the most important aspect of telling a story: if you tell your story to a silent hall, you're still living in silence.' Nirbhaya is being performed at the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh until 26 August.