LONDON: It was with some trepidation that I looked again at Borderline, a play I wrote in 1981. The Royal Court Theatre — where it was originally presented — wanted to mount a reading of it, as part of the celebrations to mark the company’s 50th anniversary this month. My father was alive in 1981, and sat enthusiastically through many performances, laughing at everything, particularly at the character of the father, who rather resembled him.
Now, 20 years later, two of my sons, aged 12, were present. I couldn’t help wondering what it would mean to them — or indeed anyone, now.
The original director, Max Stafford-Clark, whose idea the play was, had worked often with Joint Stock, a touring company started by David Hare and Bill Gaskill with the intention of getting political theatre out of London. Max told me the play would be cast, the research done in Southall — an immigrant area of west London — and then I would write it. As always, the company played in schools, community centres and gyms around the country, finally opening at a London theatre — often the Royal Court — a couple of months later. This was political theatre, emerging from the turbulent, radical intensities of the 1970s. In the case of Borderline, the idea was to show the community through its differences: different ages, political outlooks, and different hopes for the future, interweaving numerous characters and points of view.
At that time, getting a writing gig with Joint Stock was, as Max would say, ‘very high status’. I was in my mid-20s, living with my social worker girlfriend in a low-rent council flat next to a railway line in Barons Court, west London. I can’t have been making a living as a writer; I must have been on the dole. So far I had written only two full-length plays, and many unpublished novels. There were very few Asian or African-Caribbean writers, actors or directors who made a living from their work. Why did I think I’d be any different?
I was extremely nervous about the whole thing, and with good reason. It was, as far as I knew, the first play by an Asian to be produced on the main stage at the Royal Court, a theatre known for its innovation and daring. The only other black playwright I knew was Mustapha Matura, whose work I’d admired. But his work was poetic; he was no social documentarian.
For me the Joint Stock process had been frantic, if not hair-raising. The actors and theatres had been hired; everything was in place, but the play had not been written, not a word of it, and we were to start rehearsing in six weeks. I was just beginning to find out whether I could be a writer or not, trying to find a subject, characters, and words for them to say. I was already learning a lot from the directors I worked with, and from the actors: as they began to speak, the clumsiness of the lines was obvious.
Fortunately, I was hard-working then, with a fierce ambition. The play did get written. It also got rewritten. This, I saw, was when the real work began. If I’d had too ‘pure’ a view of the artist, I was soon to learn that aesthetic fastidiousness wasn’t a helpful attitude. Max was severe and precise, sending me into a dressing room with instructions to write a scene about so-and-so, with certain characters in it. I rewrote as we rehearsed; I rewrote as we played it around the country; I rewrote it when we opened at the Royal Court, and even after that. This was the first time I’d worked in such a way and it was an important proficiency to develop; it came in handy two years later when I worked with Stephen Frears on My Beautiful Laundrette, and was required to rewrite on set. I was also ambivalent about the journalistic process. I was full of material already; I had hardly touched on my own experience as a British Asian kid. Why were we interviewing strangers in order to generate material? Yet as we began to talk to people I found these conversations were not chatter; they were serious — some taking place over a number of days — and always moving. I was fascinated to hear strangers talk. It was something like a crude psychoanalysis, as one only had to ask a simple question to be drawn into a whirlpool of memories, impressions, fears, terrors. I was shocked at how much people revealed of themselves, and how much they wanted to be known, to be understood. The community was close and supportive, but the cost of this was inhibition and constraint.
Most of the actors who took part in this year’s rehearsed reading of Borderline were younger than 10 when the Southall riots took place. They required a quick history lesson. We mentioned monetarism, Norman Tebbit, the Falklands, the miners’ strike, and rioting in Brixton, Bristol, Liverpool — and Southall, where many Asians worked.
When I was approached by Max with the subject for Borderline, Southall had recently become the focus of discontent and violence. Racism was a daily occurrence for most Asians in Britain. But the characters in the play refer often to the possibility of an ‘invasion’, something they were afraid of and disturbed by, as it had already happened. In April 1979, the police allowed the fascist National Front to hold a meeting in Asian Southall. Two weeks earlier the residents met the Labour home secretary, Merlyn Rees, to ask him to ban the Front’s meeting. On the day before the march, 5,000 people went to Ealing Town Hall in support of banning the National Front’s meeting, handing in a petition signed by 10,000 residents. Local factories also agreed to strike in protest. Rees refused to give way. It was a question of free speech, even for fascists.
During the protest that followed the fascist meeting, organised by the Asians themselves along with the Anti-Nazi League — a front for the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party — the police on horses attacked the crowds; vans were driven at them. Blair Peach, a young leftwing teacher, was struck and killed by the notorious Special Patrol Group, a shadowy police/army group whose job, it was commonly said, was to beat people up. Many older Asians, who still respected the police and the British legal system, were shocked and disillusioned by the number of injuries and the unrestrained violence of the police. Meanwhile, the media represented the riots as an ‘attack on the police’. In June 1979, when the lockers of the SPG were searched, one officer was found to be in possession of Nazi regalia, bayonets and leather-covered sticks. But no officer was prosecuted.
This, then, partly explains the atmosphere of paranoia and fear in which the play’s events take place. This is why the arguments the characters have, about how to proceed socially and politically, are so important to them. They are thinking all the time about the kind of Britain in which they are living, and the kind of country the young will inherit and seek to remake.
To my surprise, looking at the play again after more than 20 years, I was not startled either by the naivety of the piece, or by the nature of my personal preoccupations then. Obviously it had dated, but in noteworthy ways. What did strike me was how little talk of religion there was among the characters. The unifying ideology of that time and place was socialism, with feminist groups such as the Southall Black Sisters, as well as some anarchist and separatist groups, also contributing to the debate.
By the 1990s, political theatre was dead. It had come to seem crude as a device for explaining the world, or for bringing news from unexplored parts of the country. But in this age of mendacity, deception and violence, there is the need, once again, for public debate about contemporary issues. Political theatre can be quick, immediate and adapted to changing circumstances, unlike most films.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
