A little bit of floor-mopping and fridge-replacement doesn’t stop me from enjoying some cultural events in the interstices. The week before the Flash Fiction Festival, I had two trips to the theatre (booked well before the domestic crises, otherwise I might not have gone).
Park Theatre near Finsbury Park station is a small neighbourhood theatre in a converted office building, specialising in new, more experimental writing. Tickets are humanly priced, every effort is made to represent a diverse community (both in terms of playwrights and actors), aimed at encouraging people into theatre who might not otherwise attend by tackling contemporary themes: what’s not to like?
This time I saw the play Alkaline by Stephanie Martin, about two childhood friends who try to reignite their friendship as both of them are newly engaged to be married. Except one of them has converted to Islam and the other seems to have a drinking problem. It’s a dinner party drama reminiscent of Abigail’s Party, replete with stilted dialogue, people trying to conceal what they really feel, and exposing the hypocritical attitude to multiculturalism and difference. My favourite part of this was when the Muslim boyfriend (who was Muslim in name only, otherwise more of a typically English bloke) started a teasing rant about how Muslims are taking over Britain. Overall, however, I felt that this was more of a personal drama rather than social commentary, so I turned to two other books on my TBR pile that also feature conversions to Islam – albeit, more extreme ones, with protagonists going to Syria to become IS fighters.
Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire doesn’t need much of an introduction: longlisted, shortlisted and finally winning literary prizes. It’s a very timely book, but it’s not just its topicality that marks it out as a winner. It is also dramatically and lyrically written: accessible and yet poetic. Much has been made of it being a retelling of the Ancient Greek story of Antigone, but the similarities become apparent only towards the end and are not, in fact, all that remarkable or relevant. I found myself somewhat unsure of the first third of the book, told from the more neutral point of view of the older sister, Isma, although it provides some much-needed level-headedness compared to the more overblown prose of the second and third part. Still, I ask myself, why is Eamonn, son of the Home Secretary, introduced to the family through her? Is it merely to give another perspective on him, to make the move from ‘trust fund baby’ to ‘distraught lover’ more dramatic? However, each character is fully developed, and there are hints of depth in the Home Secretary and his wife as well, even though they are secondary characters. As for Isma, she may be more neutral, but she is still remarkably sharp-tongued and upset about the treatment of Muslims in both Britain and the States, and she seemed more plausible a character to me than the attractive but overdramatic Aneeka.
The second book on this topic is the more straightforward thriller The Good Sister by Morgan Jones, a former investigator into financial matters and international disputes. Sofia is a young girl who leaves her unhappy family life in London and seeks to find herself in Raqqa, while her father is determined to rescue her from what he perceives as delusion and brainwashing. I’m still in the middle of reading it, but it’s becoming clear that Sofia’s idealism will be sorely tested and that she will find it very difficult to leave, just like Aneeka’s twin in Home Fire.
The final play that I saw that week was a bilingual edition of Tartuffe, on the 14th of July appropriately enough. Paul Anderson plays Tartuffe as a Southern tele-evangelist type con-man who has infiltrated the family of rich businessman Orgon (Sebastian Roche, utterly perfectly bilingual), his wife Elmire (the gorgeous Audrey Fleurot, who seemed frankly a little wasted on the play in parts, merely looking decorative in amazing dresses for quite long stretches) and his children who are mostly English-speaking and have integrated into the decadent LA society. It was an interesting concept, with some good acting, and with clear references to the present day and our tendency to fall for false promises. However, I have to admit that I found both the fast-spoken French and the Southern drawl of the English equally hard to follow, though not as impossible as some reviewers made it out to be (there were surtitles). I went there with the boys and on the whole they quite liked it – so 13 and 15 year olds were much kinder to the play than theatre critics. This negative publicity in the media meant that the theatre was half-empty, so our seats were upgraded to the stalls, so we had excellent views, but it is a shame that audiences are not more open to bilingual productions.
My older son had studied Molière – Les Fourberies de Scapin and Le Médecin malgré lui – at school as a 12-year-old, so he was somewhat familiar with the humour (although the language is still quite difficult even for French speakers, a bit like Shakespeare for English speakers), but I think the modern production helped to make it more accessible to them. For more thoughts on the genius of Molière, here is a very early post I wrote about him.
findingtimetowrite 