Writer and Director: Paul Stone
New writing festivals are an important part of the theatre ecosystem, a place to experiment, to try out ideas, characters and scenarios that can be developed into a longer performance. Paul Stone’s 40-minute piece Auntie’s House has all the right ingredients and the King’s Head Theatre’s Sight Unseen season curated by Isabel Adomakoh Young is the right forum to test this untold true story of a British Muslim woman providing a refuge to the gay community in the 1950s.
The Auntie of the title, Tamina, is getting ready for some very special visitors on a Saturday night when her sister Bibi arrives to accuse her of consorting with lots of men. Storming out, she leaves Tamina’s nephew Imran behind who stays for the party with a group of gay men who drink tea and dance to the hot music of the day including Cliff Richard. Before the night is through, Imran will have made a life-changing decision.
Stone’s play is a work in progress, a puzzle that has all of its pieces but is still finding the right order for them. And there are lots of positives, particularly a strong collection of very different characters each with a much bigger story to tell and a fascinating cultural crossover between the British Muslim experience and men forced to hide their sexuality for fear of prosecution and physical attacks. That these two strands interact in a physical location in Tamina’s living room and in a conceptual sense through the family story that Stone builds around the central family is proof that the play has plenty of potential.
Auntie’s House just needs some expansion to flesh out the central plot which relies on a number of contrivances, including characters being left alone at just the right moment, while adding extra context to the characterisation will help the audience understand how all of these very different people happen to be in this suburban house on a Saturday night. To do that, there are lots of questions that Stone could answer in future drafts of the script including what draws men to Tamina’s house, how do the backstories of each one of them affect their experience, how long has this cosy speakeasy been running and how do new guests find out about it?
The same could apply to the family story which covers a lot of ground and a large dramatic arc in a very short time, so there is more to say about Imran’s struggle against the conventions of his traditional culture and its religious teachings, why Tamina is so accepting of her father’s secret life and why the sisters take such opposite approaches to difference and unconventionality. There is more that could be extracted from these various relationships to really ground the play in the complexities of the two cultures it represents and the common ground they discover.
Ruchika Jain is a compassionate Tamina while Miriam Babooram (Bibi), Devan Modha (Imran), John Rayment (Neil), Sebastian Barrett (Sam) and Ian Kay (Peter) complete a cast that have a lot of fun with the performance. But having gathered so many people in the same room, we need to know more about who they all are, what draws them together and why they all risked so much to spend their Saturday nights at Auntie’s House.
Runs until 9 April 2023
