★★★½

“Under the direction of Imy Wyatt Corner, Passing delivers an impressively authentic portrayal of nuclear family dynamics”

Your twenties are a time for self-discovery. A time when the world and its opportunities feel open and endless, and it’s up to you to choose, to decide, who and how to be. It can feel like a dislocation from the rigid structure and linear progression of your childhood and teenage years, and the feeling becomes all the more acute when you look, as well as feel, apart from the ordinary.

In Dan Sareen’s new work, Passing, he explores some of these feelings, and how they manifest through Rachel Singh and her family. Rachel (Amy-Leigh Hickman) is a twenty-something living with her parents in an undisclosed, predominantly white area of England searching for identity or sense of belonging. Flung into crisis through the deterioration of her grandfather’s health, she realises that she knows or has experienced little North-Indian culture that is part of her heritage and so seeks to throw her family’s first, and perhaps her Grandfather’s final, Diwali celebration.

The play follows the Singh family and Rachel’s boyfriend Matt, along for the ride, on this day almost in real time, functioning almost as a sort of socratic dialogue between the family members, exploring what it means to be British-Indian. The play naturally cycles characters on and off stage, allowing each combination of characters to have their own in depth discussion and show the depth of their character and emotions. Each combination of characters has a moment together. All set in the Singh’s living room, the set could be any living room in middle England, all pine wood furniture, inoffensive landscape prints adorning the walls and the Steve Jobs biography in the bookcase. Under the direction of Imy Wyatt Corner, Passing delivers an impressively authentic portrayal of nuclear family dynamics, instantly familiar through their quick shifts between jibes and supportive warmth.

“an intelligently written, passionately performed work”

Yash (Bhasker Patel) is the patriarch who emigrated to the UK at six years old and is more interested in Led Zeppelin than Ravi Shankar. Ruth (Catherine Cusack) is the white British mother who just wants everyone to get along and clearly feels guilty for having deprived her children of their Indian heritage that they now desire. David (Kishore Walker) is the disaffected son who is intent on challenging his father and who says himself his only role in the family is to be flippant – receiving a few knowing laughs from the audience. Matt (Jack Flamminger) is the too sweet boyfriend going out of his way to make a good impression for his girlfriend’s parents and for Rachel herself, providing plenty of light relief.

Amy-Leigh Hickman is brash and headstrong as Rachel, the central figure of the play. However, to a degree this demeanour, which verges on petulance at times, belies her inner turmoil and confusion over who she is and how she should be in the world. As a daddy’s girl – she is eager to learn more about her father’s upbringing in India, but her dogged pursuit of the missing link between the way she is perceived by others as Indian, as ‘other’, and her own cultural touchstones which are more British than Indian, often comes at the expense of her empathy towards her mother and partner. It’s intentionally uncomfortable theatre – with the collision between generational and racial views cringe inducing at times. But it’s authentic; there’s no dramatic plot twists, no real events of note. Just the conversations between a relatively ordinary family that could be replicated 100-fold all across the country.

In trying to replicate that family gathering feeling there are some directorial choices that don’t quite land. For such a small studio theatre, the choice to have overlapping conversations at once doesn’t quite work as no one conversation predominates – all we get is hubub. Similarly playing the records Yash likes and dislikes, means it’s a strain to hear the dialogue over it.

That being said, Passing is an intelligently written, passionately performed work that fairly and in a nuanced way reflects experiences of mixed-race families in Britain today.

THE INTERVIEW at the Park Theatre

★★★

“Maitland’s writing and Kettle’s performance gives us a Diana that is multi-dimensional”

There is an eminent fascination with Diana, the people’s princess. More than twenty-five years after her death there are TV shows, documentaries and musicals all seeking to understand something of her, or to simply draw in the viewers. Jonathan Maitland’s original play at the Park Theatre zones in on just one interview between the princess and a reporter.

The interview in question is Princess Diana’s 1995 BBC Panorama interview with Martin Bashir. A watershed moment, the innocuous title ‘An Interview with HRH The Princess of Wales’ belied the explosive revelations made by the princess about her relationship with her husband Prince Charles, the Queen, and the rest of the royal family as well as shocking revelations about her own mental health. It was explosive stuff, hailed at the time by the BBC as ‘the scoop of a generation’. But in 2021 the BBC has vowed never to broadcast the interview again or license it to others due to Bashir’s foul-play in securing the interview.

Maitland’s play, under Michael Fentiman’s direction, explores the events leading up to the interview from the perspective of both parties, attempting to leave us asking whether this really was a one-sided manipulation on the part of Bashir, or whether Diana had more agency than critics today would have you believe.

Diana is well written and charismatically portrayed by Yolanda Kettle. With recent portrayals from Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki in The Crown to Kristen Stewart in Spencer, there is no shortage of Diana content for comparison, and whilst it’s difficult to make a Diana feel fresh, Kettle does so with humour, emphasising the princess’s lighter side. She makes jokes about the music she chooses to play to avoid her conversation with Bashir being picked up by bugging devices as being about a woman who murders her adulterous husband, and has a great retort about why her sister said she should go through with the wedding despite reservations. Maitland’s writing and Kettle’s performance gives us a Diana that is multi-dimensional – light-hearted yet deeply hurt by her husband, strong-willed yet insecure, paranoid yet with good reason.

“the lights fade, and the audience groans, having been teased with what would have been the highlight of the evening”

Sami Fendall’s costume design is peak 90s with Diana’s ‘off-duty princess’ styling of belted dark rinse Levi 501s and a tucked in white shirt. Her short bouffant crop looks almost comically voluminous but is actually pretty spot on when compared to the stills from the interview itself.

Tibu Fortes as Martin Bashir is incredibly sincere and despite his refrain that he and Diana are the same, outsiders, in many ways his character stands in stark contrast. Whereas Diana is emotionally complex, Bashir seems to have only one motivation – to score the interview of a generation by doing whatever he needs to do to get it. Maitland’s choice to have Bashir use the same story about his dead brother to endear himself to Diana and her Butler is Machiavellian and makes us wonder whether he even had a brother at all. Act II focuses in on Bashir through the editing process and the fallout does him few favours. However, the suggestion that the fraudulent methods used to get the interview were the start of a long line of truth doctoring that stretched forward through Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’ to Trump was a ham-fisted stretch.

It’s also an odd choice to have much of the first act narrated by Diana’s infamous butler, Paul Burrell. His character is almost totally redundant, other than perhaps to show that even those close to Diana were looking for ways to elevate themselves at her expense. A much more interesting aide is Luciana, wittily played by Naomi Frederick, perhaps a press or media secretary or just a close confidante who comes from the same world as Diana but seems to understand what she’s going through.

The second act does let this piece down, swapping conversations between the princess and the reporter for dry ethical conversations between the broadcaster and his BBC bosses. It starts to look up when the Kettle as Diana re-emerges after a long absence and converses with Bashir as if from beyond the grave, arguing that despite the foul-play, those were words she wanted the world to hear. Chairs appear carried by other cast members and you start to hope we will see some of the interview recreated live. But then the lights fade, and the audience groans, having been teased with what would have been the highlight of the evening – Diana live and self-scripted as she intended to be.

PASSING at the Park Theatre

★★★½

“Under the direction of Imy Wyatt Corner, Passing delivers an impressively authentic portrayal of nuclear family dynamics”

“an intelligently written, passionately performed work”

PASSING at the Park Theatre

Reviewed on 6th November 2023

by Amber Woodward

Photography by Matt Martin

Previously reviewed at this venue:

Passing

Passing

THE INTERVIEW at the Park Theatre

★★★

“Maitland’s writing and Kettle’s performance gives us a Diana that is multi-dimensional”

“the lights fade, and the audience groans, having been teased with what would have been the highlight of the evening”