Skip to main content

My Name Is...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
The newspaper headlines that surround the estranged family in Sudha
Bhuchar's new play for Tamasha Theatre Company may scream of how a
young Scottish/Pakistani girl was kidnapped by her father, but the
truth is infinitely more complex. Drawn from interviews with the real
life mother, father and daughter whose faces were seen all over the
world in 2006 when just such an incident occurred, Bhuchar's play
changes their names to try and explain the back-story to what happened.

In Philip Osment's simple but stately production, Farhan and Suzy tell
how they met and fell in love in Glasgow, with a teenage Suzy
converting to Islam as they marry and have children, including their
youngest, Ghazala. As personal and cultural tensions coming to the
fore, the marriage falls apart and Farhan returns to Pakistan, with
Ghazala moving across continents to be with one parent or the other.

This is a sad, emotionally raw story that is laid bare without
sentiment as the family's words reveal a fragile, warts and all world
of painful decisions that have disastrous consequences for all. Buchar
wisely doesn't take sides or attempt to offer any easy solutions in a
drama that has moved on considerably from where her play ends. Rather,
she and Osment allow the understated power of the piece to come through
a fantastically nuanced trio of performances from Kiran Sonia Sawar as
Ghazala, Umar Ahmed as Farhan and especially Karen Bartke as Suzy.
While the resonances of the play being performed in Glasgow cannot be
understated, for all the heartbreak on show, it's the moments of love
you remember most.

The Herald, June 2nd 2014


ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more