New British plays explore minority talent
LONDON: Last week under the umbrella title of Unheard Voices, the Royal Court theatre in London presented extracts from plays written by six young Muslims, which the Guardian’s culture columnist Michael Billington has described as a big breakthrough.
Dominic Cooke, the Court’s director, described Unheard Voices as “an act of enlightened self-interest” good, in short, for both the Court and young Muslims. It’s also the result of a long process.
Last June, Lucy Dunkerley, as part of the Royal Court Young Writers Programme, approached schools, colleges and community centres in an attempt to discover young Muslim talent. “We were looking,” she says, “for people between 16 and 26 who had an original voice, something to say and an ability to write. We ended up with a group of eight men and 12 women and, starting in January, gave them an intensive 10-week course, which examined all aspects of playwriting from character and subtext to location. Then we asked everyone to go away and write a draft play.”
Mr Billington mentions in his column Act of Faith in the Wednesday edition of his newspaper that he met six of the writers in March, at the end of their course, and was overcome by their brightness, articulacy and passionate curiosity. Since the three men and three women he met seemed to mix happily, he questioned the sexual segregation of the workshop, with men working in one group and women in another. This, Dunkerley explained, was done “out of respect for people’s religion”.
When he asked the group what they wanted to write about, he got some fascinatingly diverse replies. May, a graduate who has made short films for Channel 4, was intrigued by “Muslim tokenism in the media, driven by white middle-class guilt”.
Hammaad, reading law at the University of Surrey, had an idea for a story that switched between the White House and Wembley, about the 48 hours leading up to the Iraq war. Mediah, studying biophysics at Queen Mary College, wanted to explore the tensions that arise when a Muslim girl falls for a non-Muslim boy. And Osama – “not the best of names at the moment,” he joked wanted to dramatise “the suspicion that all Muslims are terrorists”.
Each of these writers had strong individual ideas. When Mr Billington asked what motivated them to write without exception, creativity was seen as inseparable from their religion. “In everything I do,” said one, “my faith is very important. You find God in your daily actions. And playwriting is itself a product of faith.”
The one thing on which all were insistent was the importance of authenticity. As Hammaad said about Channel 4’s Britz, written and directed by Peter Kosminsky: “If you’re going to have a series about an Asian Muslim family, then it would make sense to employ Asian Muslim writers.”
The problem is that, until now, there hasn’t exactly been a large pool on which to draw. After seeing extracts from six of the 20 draft plays given a rehearsed reading last week, Mr Billington said he had a hunch that he would be hearing more from some of them. It was especially fascinating to learn for him that three of the writers he met in March had made the final cut. Hammaad’s play, Salaam Mr Bush, hilariously showed a distracted Dubya being bullied by his father and brother on the eve of the Iraq war and even taught how to carve a turkey. Osama’s Arab in the West, as promised, dramatised the culture gap between young Muslims and their western friends: “When I go to your house,” asked one of them, chirpily, “why do I always remember Aladdin?” Only May had deviated from her original idea about tokenism, coming up instead with a funny, moving encounter between a testy patriarch and his mutinous, backpacking son.
If any big theme emerged from this project, it was the ever-widening gap between the East and West. Siama Shah’s For God’s Sake showed a brother and sister arguing ferociously about a recent visit to Pakistan (“At least in London,” says the sister, “we have buses with a maximum passenger number”). Hasan Minhas’s The Next Step explored the wide divide between a Muslim employer and his Polish cleaner. Among the most resonant was Shades by Alia Bano, who teaches A-level English at a north London school. Bano took as her heroine a westernised Muslim who worked as an events organiser and was under constant pressure to conform.
“A hijab is integral to a woman’s identity,” she is brusquely informed, and her choice of a boyfriend, without her family’s approval, is clearly destined to cause ructions.
What happens next? All the writers who took part in the Royal Court’s workshops will be invited to work on their scripts, with dramaturgical help, and submit them to the Royal Court’s Young Writers festival. The best then stand a good chance of full-scale production. More importantly, the theatre is encouraging a generation of young Muslims to explore their preoccupations and predicaments everything from cultural stereotyping to the role of women in a secular society.
Mr Billington suspected new British drama, in the years ahead, will increasingly come from minority groups; by giving a platform to these fledgling writers, the court is spreading information and light.
He said: “We all need urgently to learn about the multicultural society in which we live. Or, as Alia Bano wittily puts it in Shades: ‘Not enough people know about Islam and that’s just Muslims’.”