Traverse
Theatre, Edinburgh
Four
stars
Meeting your granny for
the first time in years can be full of surprises. So it goes for the young man
in Umar Butt’s play whose life working in the family corner shop on Sauchiehall
Street is leavened both by the banter with his fly Jamaican customer Alex and
his excursions into amateur dramatic musicals. With his family away, it is left
to him to granny-sit Eliza, who has flown in for what turns out to be a night
of surprises and revelations of life and death adventures that took her to the
place she learnt to call home.
Umar Butt plays a
version of himself in his beautifully realised true story. From his own doorstep,
it travels the world in its evocation of the traumas of migration following the
partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Here, the multiple forms of identity
that resulted for a young girl who crossed personal and global borders makes
her a liberated symbol of a world without walls. At the heart of this is the
love story between Eliza and her accidental marriage to another Alex, which
leads her eventually to a Glasgow flat and an old harmonium.
All this is delivered in
a charmingly engaging fashion in Butt’s own production for the ARC, Stockton,
with the first half of Butt’s 75-minute opus engaging with the audience as each
exchange is punctuated with a song or dance routine. This is just the sucker
punch, however, for infinitely more serious things at play.
With Butt playing his
own grand-father and Seweryna Dudzinska as Eliza, the play leaps across time as
much as Hannah Sibal’s crate-based set. Danny Charles is a versatile foil as assorted
extended family members, with the whole thing pulsed along by Laura Stutter’s
live sound-scape. The result is a moving of-the-moment evocation, not just of
the buried treasure in every family history, but of how events beyond one’s
control can shape a life of everyday heroism beyond.
The Herald, November 14th 2019
ends
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