“There’s a lot of charm in the storytelling – the playfulness and joy in the girls friendship is particularly lovely – but the script can only skate across the surface of these turbulent waters”
1947 was a tumultuous year in sub-continental history. India became independent, and partition forced the migration of over ten million Indian Muslims to Pakistan, during which, millions were slaughtered. It is against this backdrop that we watch the friendship of two young girls play out. Santi and Naz are best friends from the same village; they play together and share confidences as best friends do. But as they grow up, their difference – Santi is Sikh and Naz is Muslim – is highlighted by the political and religious turmoil playing out around them. At the same time, Naz’s increasing awareness of her attraction to her friend – even as she is betrothed to an older man from outside the village – provides its own drama.
This is a lot to cover in an hour long piece, and as a result, none of the thematic strands can be explored with any depth. There’s a lot of charm in the storytelling – the playfulness and joy in the girls friendship is particularly lovely – but the script can only skate across the surface of these turbulent waters. Although accessible to everyone, the play will be richer for those with some knowledge of this history; Rose-Marie Christian (Santi) is splendidly funny as she impersonates Gandhi and Jinnah, for example, but funnier if these figures are already present in the mind’s eye. In contrast, the true horror of the trains full of murdered migrants is impossible to convey with a single reference, and, despite a writerly attempt to address this through analogy (the decapitation of a donkey in the village) it still seemed superficial and somewhat grating. Similarly, the fleeting moments addressing Naz’s attraction to her friend left this reviewer wanting more.
The luxury of a longer time slot would iron out a lot of the problems . Guleraana Mir and Afshan D’Souza-Lodhi’s script takes poetic flight at certain points, but these moments didn’t really have time to breathe. Similarly, the sketched-in movement sequences have the potential to be much more fully realised and really give the texture that they only teased at here. This evening’s performance felt like the beginning of a creative journey, rather than the culmination of one, but one well worth continuing.
“ultimately, it felt like a surface creation, which failed to realise its deeper ambitions”
Andy Warhol’s 1967 erotic film ‘I, A Man’ shows the central male character in a series of sexual encounters with eight different women, including Valerie Solanas and Nico. Valerie was the founder of radical feminist organisation SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men) and later went on to attempt to assassinate Warhol, and Nico was the German model and singer famed for her high profile rock ‘n’ roll affairs, as well as for her work with Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground. On the surface, the two women couldn’t be more different: one a working-class butch lesbian from New Jersey, the other a leggy blonde heterosexual European, and yet, as Polly Wiseman’s play points out, they shared more than their surface would initially suggest. Wiseman’s play throws the two women together in an imagined green room situation during the filming of ‘I, A Man’ and uses it as a contemporary feminist call to arms. The final image of the piece is a projection of the question, ‘What do you want to change in the world for women?’, and we are invited to pin our thoughts to a noticeboard, or to tweet them, @SCUM2019.
It’s a great premise, and an admirable cause, and there is clearly an appetite for this kind of work. Hundreds of women were on their feet night after night hearing the clarion call from Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia, ‘‘If they try to burn you, may your fire be stronger than theirs SO YOU CAN BURN THE WHOLE F*CKING HOUSE DOWN’. Unfortunately, in this case, the touch paper just didn’t light. The play felt hampered by specificity; by the very particular accents required of the performers, and, too, by the notoriousness of the period. The obvious audience enjoyment of Wiseman’s impersonation of Nico’s infamous deadpan German drawl, added to the smattering of 60s rock icon name-checks – Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed – ultimately detracted from the piece’s political power. Similarly, much of the quickfire dialogue came across as glib and parodic. When Nico says, ‘Sunshine depresses me. There is too much expectation’, and Valerie voices the line, ‘Men’ll pay big to shoot the shit with a cunning linguist’, these broad brushstrokes limit them as women and take away from their humanity, which, in turn, makes it difficult for us to take them seriously. It also seemed a strange decision to characterise Valerie with such relentless cheerfulness. The women are different enough without this added extra thrown in. Another odd choice was the one to have Valerie mention her death by overdose. When Wiseman herself tells us – in Valerie’s potted biography printed in the script – that she died of pneumonia, what does this change do, other than falsely play into the already-problematic late-60s drug narrative that is touched on here?
The show was well designed – credit here to Sally Hardcastle (stage design) and particularly to Nathan Evans and Sophie Bailey for their excellent sound and video work – but ultimately, it felt like a surface creation, which failed to realise its deeper ambitions. Despite the cabaret moments, and the occasional use of direct address, Sophie Olivia’s Valerie and Polly Wiseman’s Nico never fully reached out and touched us from that stage, which is a shame, because, in reality, those women’s lives most definitely did.
