Sumukhi Suresh Unfiltered: Why women deserve bigger stages as she brings a riskier 'Hoemonal' to London

Highlights:

• Comedian-creator Sumukhi Suresh frames Hoemonal as a string of lived moments shaped by “hormones” rather than neat narratives.
• The show has grown in scope since its last London run: larger venues, fuller ambitions and a clearer audience focus on women.
• Sumukhi discusses risk, crafting unlikeable protagonists (Pushpavalli), founding Motormouth Writers and the practical demands of touring big productions.

Sumukhi Suresh opened Hoemonal by naming the show’s true co-star: hormones. The title, she says, is not a punchline. It works more like a container for all the loose, messy pieces of life that she threads together onstage — the doubts, the desires, the shifts in confidence, and the everyday disorder most women recognise but rarely hear spoken aloud.

Speaking exclusively to Eastern Eye ahead of her London shows, Sumukhi Suresh is direct, thoughtful and quick with her humour, much like she is onstage.

“They really consume my day,” she told Eastern Eye, describing how the show stitches short scenes into a larger portrait of a woman learning to explore her sexuality and own her impulses without shame.

Sumukhi Suresh says Hoemonal proves women back bold comedy on their own terms

Bigger stages, clearer purpose

Two years on from her last London run, Suresh says the show has both tightened and expanded. The content’s core remains the same, she explains, but production choices and new collaborators have pushed Hoemonal toward wider audiences.

The vision culminated in a massive, risky bet: a 2000-seater in Bombay. “We got the venue locked 17 days before the show. Sell 2000 tickets in 17 days? We did. We sold 2004 tickets.” That win has emboldened her. Now, playing bigger rooms like the one in Walthamstow, London, is not just an ambition, but a mission to pave the way for other female comics. “I want a piece of that pie,” she states firmly. “So that after me, if it is a Prashasti or a Swati, they can do a 1000-seater, which could merge into my 1000… This is massively needed.”

Also, bringing a producer on board, she says, made her see the show as capable of larger reach and clarified its target: women who will follow her work beyond a single season. That ambition has practical consequences. Suresh describes the anxiety and payoff of scaling up and argues that women’s comedy must be given the same commercial space men routinely occupy.

Sumukhi Suresh reveals why Hoemonal became her most fearless show yetInstagram/sumukhisuresh

The body and the stage

Our conversation eventually moves to body image, something she discusses with an ease that comes from lived experience. Sumukhi, who has been open about her weight changes, talks about that phase with striking clarity. She says the real shift began the moment she stopped battling her own reflection. “The day I stopped giving it a deadline… it just eased the tension.”

She believes that hating your body is counterproductive. “If you hate your body, then your body does not want to… it feels bad! It is like, if you hate me, why should I work for you?”

Sumukhi Suresh says women pushed Hoemonal to sold-out thousand-seaters Instagram/sumukhisuresh

Flaws, empathy and creative risk

Sumukhi’s eye for complicated protagonists remains central to her practice. With Pushpavalli, she and her writers refused to moralise. “We did not want to take a moral stand,” she says. The aim was not to make the lead likeable but watchable and compelling. The same logic informs Hoemonal : the show risks alienating some viewers precisely because it refuses the tidy moral comfort. That risk, she argues, is necessary if comedy is to broaden what kinds of women are visible on screen and stage.

Sumukhi also credits time spent mentoring on Comicstaan for sharpening her craft: seeing contestants write and perform regularly pushed her to treat daily writing as an essential discipline.

If she could go back and advise her younger self, the one just starting out in Bangalore, her message would be simple: “Do exactly what you want to do right now.” She reflects, “I was very careful about not taking a lot of advice… Whenever I was told to not take risks, I made sure I took risks.” That fearless attitude, she admits, has mostly worked in her favour.

Sumukhi brings Hoemonal to Soho Theatre Walthamstow on Saturday 29 November at 8pm. Tickets are available through the Soho Theatre website.