Before I attended the Propeller festival of Asian theatre on Monday night, I had thought that a showcase for specifically Asian talent would be dated and retrogressive.
Post-East is East, post-Bombay Dreams, post-Slumdog Millionaire, I felt we were a bit beyond this potentially patronising sort of “platform”. The planned mothballing of the BBC’s Asian Network feels like the final boot for a state-sponsored British Asian cultural movement and I half-agreed with commentators l Catherine Bennett who welcome its demise as healthy sign of the times.
Also unlike Asian music, film and dance, most audiences wouldn’t claim Asian theatre as a distinct artistic genre or, I suspect, care if a play is brought to them by Asian directors, set-designers, and writers.
However, two days and four plays later, I now want to see Propeller staged at the National Theatre next year. Here, I have seen more fresh, exciting drama about modern Britain that truthfully reflects my experience of it than in my entire adult theatre-going life. And these performances are just works in progress.
Since my first-generation Pakistani immigrant parents first introduced me to theatre, at the National 25 years ago, I’ve been hoping to see something of their and my world reflected on its stages with the same quality of the Molière play we first attended. But the more Asian themed work I’ve seen at the National over the years, the less I’ve wanted to see any Asian theatre anywhere.
In fact, in the last year I’ve attended three performances there which portrayed British Asian or Muslim identity: The Black Album, Waiting and England People Very Nice. Although well-intentioned, Waiting, a verbatim play about the women left behind when their husbands were interned under terror laws was not really drama at all but performed journalism. Despite its intention to give voice to the voiceless, it was an outsider’s version of Muslim womanhood seen through the prism of headlines, which ended up reinforcing the idea of us as victims.
The Black Album, again about terrorism (I spot a theme), was embarrassingly dull. And England People… succeeded because it was honest about its shallow treatment of characters of all races. The National seems institutionally incapable of staging a high quality production with three-dimensional contemporary Asian characters. The success of Tamasha, the theatre company behind Propeller, in doing just that would suggest that the problem is a lack of awareness among people who commission and produce plays, rather than those who write them.
In the Propeller plays (Snookered, Lotus Beauty, Blood and Zindabad) the characters, storylines and dialogue ring true. True – not self-consciously authentic, and not crowded out by a sea of issues. Snookered is about four young men meet up in a snooker hall on evening on the birthday of their dead friend Talub. Its writer, Ishy Din, has a sharp ear for quick-fire, blokey, put-downs which are delivered throughout with perfect timing by a remarkably assured cast. But the irresistibly silly schoolboy banter is woven into much darker deeper probings into fragile masculinity reminiscent of Glengarry Glen Ross.
When one character is accused of being a “fundo” because he’s not drinking alcohol I fear the obligatory airing of the “Jihadi generation” issue but it never comes, at least not in an explicit way. Difficult themes like religion, drug addiction, misogyny, poverty and racism do feature but Snookeredis first and foremost a subtle, complex, entertaining and truthful play about the inner lives of young British men who happen to be Muslims.
On the face of it, Propeller is the result of a rough and ready 3 weeks in workshops and rehearsal rooms in a church hall in Pimlico. In fact Tamasha first commissioned writers Ishy Din, Satinder Chohan, Avaes Mohammad and Em Hussain years ago as part of an ongoing quest to find and develop new writers. Din, who works as a taxi driver in Middlesbrough, told me the prolonged support was crucial for him because he doesn’t move in the rarefied London-based theatre world. Chohan spent two months working in a Hounslow beauty salon to research Lotus Beauty, which is set in one.
Come to think of it, this is exactly how East is East came about – it was Tamasha that first “found” the script for East is East and developed it as a play. It’s the same painstaking route that produces good theatre everywhere – Asian or not.
Propeller is on until Saturday 27 March at The Gate theatre, London
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