Diversity in drama

For BAMER watchers in the UK, a good place to start could be The Stage Debut Awards, a three-year-old initiative whose nominees have included a diverse set of theatre practitioners across regions and ethnicities. The awards, announced this week, won Atri Banerjee the Best Director for Hobson’s Choice, which was staged at Manchester’s Royal Exchange earlier this year, and relocates Harold Brighouse’s classic to the local Hindu community. Last year’s edition saw Akshay Sharan take home the Best Actor in a Play, for the titular part in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Being so feted for their directing and acting debuts will likely provide a much-needed fillip to the budding careers of Banerjee and Sharan, who belong to a burgeoning community of creative individuals of Indian stock, whose works, even while addressing the needs and concerns of their communities, play out unapologetically to the British mainstream.

Shining a light

For those who’ve come in late, the acronym BAMER stands for Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and Refugee (the ‘R’ was a recent addition). It is a demographic that has been historically underrepresented in the arts and elsewhere, but in recent years, industry-wide efforts have been made to address this imbalance. Perhaps a comparable designation in India could be DBA (Dalit Bahujan and Adivasi), which has not attracted a similar diversity drive here, except perhaps for efforts like those of Masaan director Neeraj Ghaywan, who courted controversy earlier this month due to a casting call with an affirmative-action caveat.

Banerjee took over Tanika Gupta’s interpretation of Hobson’s Choice, after director Pooja Ghai stepped down during the rehearsals stages due to ‘unforeseen personal circumstances’. The young director has certainly proved capable of commandeering the production to a well-received opening run, with The Guardian stating, “Banerjee’s deftly choreographed production dances across the sewing-box of a set.” Brighhouse’s original play, written in 1915 but set in Salford of the 1880s, is taken forward a whole century by Gupta, its shoe-makers now a family of Indian tailors, who arrived in the UK after being booted out of Uganda by Idi Amin. The play is set 15 years after the event, circa 1987. While expectedly the dramatis personae now have Indian monikers like Durga or Ali, the eponymous character (played by Tony Jayawardena) is a patriarch so grateful to Tories for welcoming the exiled Asians to the UK, that he changes his name to Hari Hobson. His three daughters, so emblematic of their times, are played by Shalini Peiris, Safiyya Ingar and Maimuna Memon. This updated cultural context, set in Manchester’s shape-shifting Northern Quarter of the 1980s, appears to have come good if the glowing reviews are any indication.

Gupta had first adapted Hobson’s Choice in 2003, which The Guardian’s reviewer described as “[sticking] too closely to the psychological patterns of the original,” even if the production itself was a delight. Of the 2019 production, which is a re-imagining of the 2003 play, WhatsonStage writes, “Hari’s stories of being labelled a ‘Paki’ and nearly beaten to death during his early years in Britain strike at the heart of the hideous racism that was simply a lived element of the immigrant experience.” For Banerjee, this perhaps struck too close to the bone. In an interview with The Stage, the media organisation founded in 1880 that organises the awards, he spoke of how he was the victim of a racist attack himself, when miscreants broke into the property where he was staying looking for ‘Asian gold’, just the evening before rehearsals started. “I looked like I’d been beaten up in a cage fight, so I had to explain to the company what had happened,” he said. “The 90% South Asian cast completely got it and were very sympathetic and supportive.” Fortunately, it has been smoother since that less than propitious beginning, and the breakthrough award is likely the cherry on top.

Talent report

Elsewhere, minority talents abound in theatre. This includes Sacha Dhawan’s turn as Dr Valentino, an immigrant at risk of deportation, in Nicholas Hytner’s production of Alan Bennett’s Allelujah! Or, the Royal Court production of Abhishek Majumdar’s Pah-La, which comprised of an impressive line-up of mainly East Asian actors, but ran into a casting controversy due to the conspicuous absence of Tibetan talent, prompting the hashtag #SeeTibetans on Twitter. Flashpoints like these, whether warranted or not, do take the discourse forward, and result in the steps that will ultimately make true diversity more than just a utopian dream.

Source: Read Full Article