The Queen

In 1585, Queen Durga finds herself pushed to the margins of her own palace after her husband takes another wife. As her place in the kingdom begins to slip away, she must navigate a changing marriage, her son's uncertain future and the growing political threat around them. The Queen is a layered historical drama about love, power, ambition and what it takes to survive when the rules of the court are constantly shifting.

What happens when a queen begins to lose her place in the very kingdom she once belonged to?

Set in 1585, The Queen follows Queen Durga, who is moved to the western wing of the palace after her husband takes another wife. What begins as a deeply personal wound soon becomes something much larger. With her relevance within the palace fading, her son's future at stake and her husband's uneasy political ties with Emperor Akbar creating new dangers, Durga finds herself navigating a world where one wrong move could cost her everything.

Written by Aditya Rawal and directed by Daniel D'Souza, the play looks beyond the familiar image of the historical queen. Durga is neither simply a victim nor a scheming royal figure. Instead, she is presented as a deeply human woman wrestling with love, loss, ambition, jealousy and the instinct to survive.

The story draws inspiration from the emotional worlds of Macbeth and Medea, while placing its characters within a distinctly Indian historical setting. At its heart, The Queen is less about the grandeur of a royal palace and more about the people inside it, and the quiet battles for affection, relevance and power that can shape the fate of an entire kingdom.

Produced by 72° East Productions, the play features Puja Sarup as Queen Durga, alongside Danish Hussain or Mukul Chadda, Sharvari Deshpande, Rohit Mehra or Dheer Hira in the other principal roles.

A story of a woman, a kingdom and everything that happens when love, power and survival begin pulling in different directions.