Living with Etty

by Catriona Troth

Photo courtesy of Ricardo Barros

Etty Hillesum was a Jewish woman from the Netherlands murdered in Auschwitz. Like Anne Frank, she kept a diary which was found and published after her death. But perhaps because Etty is a more morally complex and ambiguous character, it took 38 years before her diary was published, and even now it is hardly known.

A chance discovery at a yard sale brought Etty into the life of actress and writer Susan Stein. And now, through the one-woman play she wrote based on the diaries, Etty has become her life’s work. Between performances during her latest British tour, Stein explained how the play came about, and how it develops as she travels the world, bringing Etty to an astonishing range of audiences.

I began by asking Stein how she first encountered Etty Hillesum, and why she decided to turn her diaries into a play.

“I first heard of the book from a college roommate’s mother who did not recommend books lightly.

She said it had changed her life. Then a few months later, I found a copy at a yard sale in a little town in Maine for 50 cents. It was the abridged version, “An Interrupted life”. It would fit in your pocket.

“At first didn’t like her at all. Etty seemed self involved. She is sleeping with two different men, trying to figure out who she wants to be with. She has this very odd relationship with her therapist.

“But at some point in my reading something shifted. I am not sure when it happened. I have tried to go back and pinpoint it, but I’ve never been able to find it again. But somehow Etty got under my skin.

“It’s as if she were sitting next to me, whispering her life to me. It’s uncomfortable, awkward. And sometimes friendly. Not precious. Sometimes incredibly poetic. Self conscious. All those things. Sometimes I have the feeling I’m not supposed to be reading this. It’s way too intimate. Too naked.

“I had never experienced a book like this. Never felt someone so raw and vulnerable. Yet at this point, I was still reading the abridged version, which was somewhat sanitised. Not quite her at all. She was a little bit turned into ‘Saint Etty.’

“Even so, her sensibility is remarkable. When she gets to the place where she says, “You cannot help us, God. I shall have to help you,” I stopped breathing. Who is this woman? What does she find deep in herself that she comes to that understanding?

“I had read the book jacket, so I knew she didn’t survive. I didn’t want to let go. An intimacy I’d barely experienced with my closest friends. I am the slowest reader I know, but I could feel myself slowing down even more as I neared the end.

“I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t better known. I remember thinking, ‘I know, I’ll make a play, bring it to people and they will want to read the diaries for themselves.’ (Which is still my goal, by the way.) But I didn’t do it straight away. A few years later, I was in a car accident. That night, in the emergency room, the thought came to into my head, ‘I didn’t do that play.’ Where did that come from?

“I’ve worked on it now for eight years. Now it is a full time job, and it is still evolving.”

Photo courtesy of  Ricardo Barros

As a writer, I was fascinated to know how she went about taking someone’s words and turning them into a play.

“I spent over a year, just distilling it. To begin with I thought I could just take the bits I liked. But then I started working with the director, Austin Pendleton. He made me see that it had no dramatic spine. He started giving me assignments to help me shape it.

“He asked me first to outline, not Etty’s life, but the story of the diary itself. Three weeks later I was still struggling with that. Then someone said to me, ‘Are you reading academic work about the Holocaust? You know more than Etty knows, about what’s happening and what will happen. It’s getting in the way.’

“I was very focused on dates. Austin pushed me to abandon chronology. At first I couldn’t do it. I had dates fixed in my head. ‘On July such and such, 1942, she said this!’

“I remember having coffee with a woman writing her Ph.D. on Etty. She encouraged me to ‘let Etty guide me to the script.’ Then I spent some time with Etty's actual diaries in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam. I saw how her handwriting evolved over time. It helped me move closer to her words, and the words began to take me to a deeper place.

“Another thing Austin asked me was “Where is her shame?”I had to get underneath her words, figure out what she is NOT saying. I didn’t like where that took me.

“I could deal with certain parts of her shame. I knew she was ashamed of how large her breasts were. I imagine her stripped naked at Auschwitz. I worry about how she felt then, in front of all those people.

“But I had to take Etty off a pedestal. I was protecting her. I was struggling with my relationship with her, and I was also struggling as a Jew, especially about her menial work for the Jewish Council. That’s a thorny piece of the play. A thorny piece of history. It’s been one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of the play to get right.

“At one point, I performed Etty at a Quaker Meeting House in Aberystwyth. After that performance, some people were seeing Etty as a collaborator, which shows how easy it is for people to view victims as collaborators. It made me realise I still had a lot of work to do. By choosing to include the Jewish Councils, I had set myself a difficult task of introducing a complicated piece of history into the play, history most audiences were not familiar with. To clarify the Councils, I had put too much focus on them and the play seemed more about the Councils than about Etty and her remarkable sensibility.

“The Nazis were very smart in the way they created the Jewish councils. They put Jews in an untenable situation. Etty is caught in the middle. She refuses to go into hiding and save herself. Yet she accepts a menial role with the Jewish Council, which delays her deportation for several months.

“Where the bind comes, for her, is when her parents and brother get to Westerbork camp. She feels obligated to do everything she can to keep them off the weekly transport to Auschwitz. Yet she knows, if she succeeds in keeping them off the transport, then three other people go in their place. She becomes part of that cat and mouse game.

“Etty is agonized by the privilege her position affords her. But Etty is not corrupt. She is a human being caught in an inhuman situation. When I talk about this to students, I tell them – we are all privileged or we wouldn’t be here today, speaking about this. It’s not wrong to have privilege. Sometimes we earn it; sometimes we just get lucky. So what do we do with that privilege?

“What I have come to realise is that, within 10 days of keeping the diary, something is released in Etty. This is my interpretation, but I believe that force is what she is calling God. I believe that when she gets to Westerbork, she understands that this is the role she has been cast in. She has to be open to it and be present. She wants to ‘pass the test’. I hope she thought she did.

“So the play keeps evolving. It’s like scaffolding – when you move one thing, other things have the change as well. Each stage is different, and I don’t even realise I am in a different stage till I get there.

“The second ‘act’ of the play is now the discussion with the audience. That was something we discouraged at first – we wanted the play to be enough. But people weren’t leaving! Etty starts a conversation. Others want to continue it.”


Stein has performed Etty at an extraordinary range of venues – schools, places of worship, Native American reservations. It’s an intense emotional experience, for Stein as well as for the audience. As a film maker recently described it, ‘It’s as if this woman from 1942 walks into the room, sits down and starts talking to you.’

“I remember, before the first performance, Austin asking me, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ I decided it was someone going to sleep. But Austin said, ‘No, going to sleep is a GOOD option. Let’s make it worse. Let’s have them walk out. One at a time, till you are looking at empty chairs where there had been people. What would you do?’ I said, ‘I’d keep talking.’ And he said, ‘Good. If that happens you will get to the place where Etty was when she started writing.’

“The nearest I came to that happening was in a prison in Scotland. They brought men and women brought together when they don’t normally see each other, so it had failed before it had even started. By the time I got to the prayer, they were all but throwing things. The only reason they didn’t walk out was that they weren’t allowed to. And I kept going. I had the experience of staying with her words when no one else cared.

“Despite that, prison performances are some of the most powerful. And I’ve met the most amazing people. A teacher at Shotts prison near Glasgow. Some severely disabled children at Braidburn school in Edinburgh. Etty has brought us together.

“I had no idea the project would have the life that it’s had. I didn’t know I would travel to all these places. Sometimes I have to ask myself, am I doing this right? It’s never had a theatre run. Never reached the point where it has a momentum of its own. Every day, it’s waking up and calling people, trying to let them know about Etty, finding the next venue to do it.

“But maybe travelling round the world with a suitcase and Etty’s words is the venue for this piece. Taking her to those who wouldn’t normally go to the theatre.

“Etty’s feels like a voice we need for our times. She refused to choose the divisive. She refused to 'tilt towards the savage.’ She found another way. She paid a price for it and was willing to do that. But her words and her spirit still live and inspire.”

To find out more visit about Susan Stein and Etty Hillesum, visit http://ettyplay.org

She Called Me Mother - a new play by Michelle Inniss

By Catriona Troth

Cathy Tyson and Chereen Buckley in She Called Me Mother. Photo: ©Richard Davenport

A few weeks ago, I caught a livestream of an extraordinary new play – She Called Me Mother. In it, actor Cathy Tyson plays Evangeline, a 70 year old Trinidadian immigrant selling the Big Issue on the streets of London. It was a remarkable performance by Tyson, who held the stage for well over an hour.

Evangeline has been homeless for a long time, searching for her daughter, who ran away when she was just sixteen. From time to time, the daughter slips on stage, speaking into the rift that has grown between them, giving her version of events. But for most of the play, Evangeline is alone with her memories.

“I try not to tink about she too much, ‘cause de pain dem thoughts bring it like a herd of buffalo runnin wild in a field, an I beneath dem foot.”

The play was put on by Pitch Lake Productions – a collaboration between the play’s author Michelle Inniss, actress Cathy Tyson and director Cara Nolan – under the auspices of Black Theatre Live. This trailer on YouTube will give you a taste of the rich Trinidadian vernacular in which the play is written. You can also explore both the language and themes through this Education Pack from Pitch Lake Productions.
Here I talk to Michelle Inniss, and learn more about how the play came to be written.

Hi, Michelle. I believe She Called Me Mother was inspired by a chance encounter at London Bridge station. Can you start by telling us more about that?

Several years ago, I was travelling regularly through London Bridge Station to visit my mother, who was very ill. I kept passing an elderly Afro-Caribbean woman selling the Big Issue. One day, I suppose because my head was full of my mum, when I stopped to speak to her, instead of calling her ‘auntie’ (which is a term of respect for an older woman in the Caribbean) I called her ‘mother.’ Her face lit up. After that, whenever I passed by, she wanted to give me something – some sweets, or a little bit of her food.

The last time I saw her was just after my mum passed away. She noticed I was upset and asked what the trouble was. When I told her, she reached into her trolley, grabbed some change – about £3 – pressed it into my hand and told me I must by flowers for my mother. I tried to say no, it’s okay. But she insisted. So I went to the flower stall and bought a single white rose that still had a drop of water on the petal. I tucked it inside my coat, because it was a cold day, and when I got to the chapel, the drop of water was still there.

After that, I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman, and why she was there. I’d never asked her about her story. We’d just talked about the weather, that sort of thing.

After mum died, I couldn’t write. My mentor, Jacob Ross, told me not to worry, just to read or listen to music. Do other things. After about a month, this character woke up and started speaking to me. And it was Evangeline.


What did you draw on to create that rich poetry in Evangeline’s voice?

I think the Trinidadian vernacular has its own musicality. Cathy Tyson has done such a brilliant job of capturing that voice.

Both my parents are from Trinidad. My father loves telling stories. My mother was much quieter, but she had certain sayings – like “I wouldn’t fart on cotton for him to smell,” which she would only say when she wasn’t happy with someone, but which we all thought was terribly funny.

So I was drawing on their voices, and memories of visiting Trinidad when I was younger. And also on the voices of Trinidadian writers - for example, Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance [set in a poor neighbourhood of Port of Spain during Carnival]. I can read the prologue to that over and over again; the music of his prose just conjures up so much.


One of the things that attracted me to She Called Me Mother was that it gave voice of a homeless woman. Many years ago, I worked in a night shelter for the homeless, and I learnt then how many of them having fascinating and moving stories to tell. Why was it important for you to tell that story?

I thought a lot about how homeless people are invisible, how so many people passed her by and never really saw her, or think about their lives or how they came to be homeless. This woman was so much older than most homeless women too.

Out of this, my family started supporting St Mungo’s Broadway. I find the whole idea of not having a home to go back to such a scary thought. And we are not so far away from it, any of us. Things can happen in our lives, and we can find ourselves homeless.


She Called Me Mother is also about domestic abuse – something that straddles all strata of society. Why do you think that came out as part of Evangeline’s story?

It’s so commonplace; it’s a universal problem. But we don’t talk about nearly enough. Like homelessness, it is invisible.

I remember years ago, when we were visiting my husband's family in Spain, there was a couple who had separated and were living in different part of the same house. The husband set fire to the house and killed her. But even then, we didn’t take on board that this was something that women faced every day.

And now, because of the cuts, refuges and other services for women trying to escape violent relationships are being closed down, especially those for women from minorities.


In some ways, Evangeline’s daughter has fallen into the same trap as her mother. But she has also been stronger than her mother. How optimistic are you that her two little daughters will have a better future than either their mother or their grandmother?

From all the research I have done, there is a generational cycle, where women find themselves in abusive relationships very similar to the ones their parents have. But some women have broken that cycle. I wanted Shirley to be the one that broke that cycle. So yes, I’m optimistic.


Tell us about the development of the script. And how did Pitch Lake Production come about?

Cathy Tyson and I went to school together, and we’ve always kept in touch. When I first sent her the script, she was studying for a degree in Drama and English at Brunel University, and she put it aside until she had finished her studies.

When she came back to it, it happened to be when Black Theatre Live were putting out calls for expressions of interest. Everything came together really quickly. Cathy had just been working with a director called Cara Nolan at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool and had been really impressed with her. Cara loved the play too. So we applied, got shortlisted, and travelled up to Derby to make our pitch. And we were chosen!

After that, we had to set up our company, Pitch Lake Productions – and we haven’t really looked back since.

At that stage the play was a monologue, with just Evangeline’s voice. Several people, including Adrian Jackson from Cardboard Citizens [a group practising 'theatre of the oppressed,' working with and for homeless people] suggested that it might be possible to draw out the story of the daughter, Shirley – why she left and what had happened to her.

We were lucky that the grant from Black Theatre Live included the opportunity to spend a week workshopping the play at Clean Break studios. That was really exciting. Another actress [Jen Daley] joined us and we had Trish Cooke working with us as a dramaturge. We focused on the parts of the script where Evangeline talks about her daughter, and played around with the script. Afterwards, I went away and wrote Shirley’s part.

What’s really made it for me has been the audience response – regardless of their background. It’s been amazing how many men have come up to me after performances and said, “I didn’t think you would make me cry.”

People have taken different things from the play – not just about homelessness or domestic abuse, but about the immigrant experience too. Universal stories everyone can relate to.


Do you think She Called Me Mother is attracting a different sort of audience to the theatre?

One of the amazing things about Black Theatre Live is that they are taking plays out into the regions, and doing outreach work to engage with different sorts of audiences.

Hardish Virk did huge amounts of work around audience development in Black Theatre Live's consortium of 8 theatres, speaking to local businesses and community groups about the play. A women's group facilitated by Mashi Theatre and Derby Theatre did some work looking at some of the themes in the play. And Theatre Royal Margate produced a video of some of the local people reading from the script.

Cathy also did a workshop with a group of women from St Mungo’s Broadway – some of whom then came to see the play, as did some of the people who work there.


In a recent interview about the Act for Change project, Meera Syal said "Autonomy is the first stage of revolution." Is that something you identify with? What else could and should be done to give BAME writers and actors better opportunities?

When it comes to the question of diversity in the theatre and the arts, part of me is thinking, why are we still having this conversation? In 2011 I went to a BFI event - British African and Caribbean Women Stars of the Screen. Corinne Skinner-Carter spoke about her career and in the afternoon Cathy, Ellen Thomas and Nikki Amuka-Bird spoke about their careers, roles, stereotypes and the need for more parts for black actors. It was interesting to hear echoes of this in Corinne's talk and the following generation of female actors of colour, so the conversation continues!

In that Act for Change interview, Meera Syal comments about first needing someone to write the parts. Cathy would definitely say there is the aspect of diversity, but there is also the aspect of being a woman and there is the aspect of age. The parts get less and less the older you get. And if that is true for women in general, it is even more true for women of colour. So if there are women playwrights writing parts for older women, that has to be a good thing.

Another aspect of the diversity question is that we found it really difficult to find stage managers and production managers of colour. There are not nearly enough BAME folk in that side of theatre.

So yes, autonomy. But we need each other too. We’ve had an awful lot of support from other people. We’ve had so much goodwill extended to us from all sort of people – Jatinder Verma and Jonathan Kennedy at Tara Arts, Milan Govedarika at Black Theatre Live – it’s just amazing.


Finally, tell us about any other projects you have in the pipeline.

I am working on another play this time on the theme of forgiveness and redemption. And, yes, that would be for Pitch Lake Productions. We are such a good team. We calm each other down. We have this way of saying, “bloody hell,” in a very ‘northern’ way. And then, “let’s have a cuppa.”

Cara and Cathy are such hard workers, real grafters and really passionate and creative. I hope that we work together for a really long time.

I’m also working a novel. And trying to keep away from social media – it’s become my little distraction. Even my children are saying, “What are you doing on that tablet, mum?”

The way I work is to write whatever comes, and then I backtrack and delve into research (which is another area where I can get carried away, reading and reading and NOT writing).

I also think it’s really important to keep that constructive critical facility alive. It feeds into your reflection on your own writing too. I am thinking of rejoining my old writers’ group.

This year has been so exciting. So unexpected. So next year I am looking forward to more of the same – I hope!


Thank you, Michelle. We hope so too!

By the time you read this, the final shows of She Called Me Mother in 2015 will already have passed. But look out for its return at the new Tara Arts Theatre in Spring 2016, when they will be raising money for St Mungo’s Broadway.

Michelle Inniss is a writer and Spanish teacher, and has just completed a Masters degree in Creative Writing at Brunel University. This autumn, her story ‘Whatever Lola wants,’ was published in Closure: a new anthology of Black British writers published by Peepal Tree. She was longlisted for the new playwrights’ scheme, Angle at The Bush Theatre, in 2011, shortlisted for The Fish Short Story Prize in 2010, and in 2006 was runner up for the Penguin Decibel Short Story Prize.

Black Theatre Live is a partnership of Tara Arts, Derby Theatre, Queen’s Hall Arts (Northumberland), Lighthouse (Poole), Theatre Royal Bury St. Edmunds, Theatre Royal Margate, Stratford Circus (London) and Key Theatre (Peterborough). Black Theatre Live expects to work with emerging and established BAME companies across England to commission and tour high quality productions to the consortia theatres over the coming 3 years.

My Name Is...

by Catriona Troth

Sudha Bhuchar - photo by Robert Day

My Name Is... is a play by Sudha Bhuchar, currently on a short tour with the Tamasha Theatre Group.
It is based on the true story of a twelve year old Scottish/Pakistani girl who disappeared from her home on the Isle of Lewis.

When the story first exploded onto the front pages of British tabloid newspapers in 2006, it seemed like a classic tug-of-love, clash-of-cultures story – a young girl ‘kidnapped’ by her father and taken to Pakistan to undergo a forced marriage with an older man.

The true story was far more nuanced, as Sudha Buchar’s script, drawn from many hours of interviews, reveals.

At the Platform Theatre at Central St Martins in London, a tiny stage encompasses two sitting rooms, one in Pakistan and one on the Isle of Lewis. At the back of the stage, half obscured by a gauze curtain, are the newspaper headlines that sought to force them into one or another stereotypical box. More newspaper cuttings litter the floor.

The picture that emerges is complex and layered. By allowing us to see each family member as a true individual, by allowing their stories to unfold over time, we see how the free and easy mixing of communities in the 1980s was slowly warped by events happening in the wider world. How a damaged young woman’s need to belong drove her to create a version of herself as a perfect Muslim wife until, in her own words ‘Suzy was gone, well and truly gone.’ This is a pressure cooker created, not by the clash of cultures, but by these families and these individuals.

Bhuchar has resisted the temptation to fictionalise the story (apart from altering the names) and instead stays with the authentic voices of the three family members - father, mother and daughter – as they tell their story from different sides of the world. And those voices have extraordinary directness.

But this is not strictly ‘verbatim’ writing either. Bhuchar has shaped the script, interweaving the stories and letting the voices cut across each other, so that we hear two versions of the parents’ first meeting, two versions of family’s hajj to Mecca. At times the actors cross the invisible divide to take part in a remembered scene or speak words attributed to them by one another. At times, too, they break through a kind of ‘third wall,’ to address, not the audience in the theatre, but the original audience of Bhuchar and her tape recorder.

Afterwards, playwright and actors took part in a New Writing Platform discussion with the audience, looking the process of creating My Name Is... and the challenges of verbatim theatre This was first in a new series of events presented by the MA Dramatic Writing course run by University of the Arts London, to explore, discuss and share new ideas.

Bhuchar began by explaining how she was drawn to the story by an article in the Guardian, the first that attempted to reach beyond stereotypes and accusations, and how she approached the family and asked to interview them. She flew to Pakistan and spent several days with father and daughter. The daughter then persuaded the mother to see her, and she spent several more days on Lewis with her. The result was 120 pages of interview transcripts which took eight years to shape into this play.

“The technique came in layers,” Bhuchar explained. “I’d never worked like this in my life! To begin with I thought that I would fictionalise the story, but nothing I wrote had the power of the original words. In the end the promise I made was that, however I shaped it, I must not make up any words”

Asked about her interview technique, Bhuchar spoke of not having her own agenda, about having empathy, about being interested in simply ‘overhearing.’ One of the ways she got the mother to open up was to go back to the very beginning of the story, to when the two of them met, when they had been happy together. “Usually people don’t ask me that,” she was told.

Of the three actors, only Kiran Sonia Sawar who plays ‘Gaby/Ghazala’ wanted to listen to the interview tapes to catch the nuances of the original voices. Umar Ahmed, who plays ‘Farhan’, grew up in Pollokshields and actually knew the father by sight. Karen Bartke who is from Glasgow but from a different background to ‘Suzy’, didn’t want her performance to descend into mere imitation and found it easier to connect with the emotion through the scripts – something she did with incredible power.

Early this year, the cast had the chance to perform the play with mother and daughter (now back living in Scotland) in the audience – something that was terrifying but also profoundly gratifying. Seeing their parents’ early lives together played out, in their own words, was particularly moving for the daughter. She told the actors afterwards that, as the youngest child, she had almost no memory of her parents being happy together.

At the end of the discussion, one of the audience members commented that he had been waiting all through it for the author to come down on one ‘side’ or another. Yet that never happens. By allowing each of the characters their own authentic voice, she manages to preserve a balance, so that your heart reaches out to each of them in turn.

You can read the Guardian article the first inspired Bhuchar to write the play here.

And you can read my interview with Sudha Bhuchar about her time as Artistic Director of Tamasha here.

Sudha Buchar: Making a Commotion with Tamasha

by Catriona Troth

Tamasha is a Hindi word meaning a commotion or creating a stir. And for the last 25 years, the Tamasha Theatre Group, founded by Sudha Buchar and Kristine Landon-Smith, has been creating a stir, first as a voice for the South Asia diaspora in Britain, and more recently as a voice for a whole range of rarely represented cultures.

Sudha Bhuchar - photo by Robert Workman

Now, a few months before she hands over the reins of the company to her successor, Bhuchar talks to Catriona Troth about Tamasha’s past, present and future.

“I began working with Jatinder Verma at Tara Arts. At that time it was just a community group, and I
wasn’t a professional actor. I was a chronically shy teenager and it would never have occurred to me to be an actor. But I became involved because I was hungry to engage like-minded people,” Bhuchar begins.

Her long-term partner at Tamasha, Kristine Landon-Smith, was already a professional actor when she joined Tara a few years later, playing a male part in Broken Thigh, a play based on a story from the Mahabarat. In the course of that tour, the two became close friends.

It was on one of her occasional trips home to see her family in India that Landon-Smith became involved in promenade performance of the modern Indian classic novel Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand. She brought a video of the production back to show Bhuchar, and the two realised there were no equivalent contemporary stories of the Asian diaspora on the British stage. It was to fill that gap that the two women set up the Tamasha Theatre Company in 1989.

“We had some seed funding from Tara and they hosted a reading of Untouchable. Then we got some Arts Council funding to do a tour and got into Riverside Studios. But we were incredibly naive. We didn’t realise that we had effectively underwritten the show. If the production had failed, we would have been £60k in debt. Fortunately it didn’t fail.”

Some of their casting challenges were extraordinary. “Untouchable was a cast of 10 or 11, mostly young boys, and we had this crazy idea to perform it one night in English and one night in Hindi. So we were looking for a cast of bilingual boys! But we have always searched for new talent – not necessarily on the radar, not necessarily from drama schools.

“Back then, there was a real hunger among Asian audiences. Phillip Headley at Stratford East wanted to engage with the audience on his doorstep, so he asked us what we could do. Our first couple of shows – like House of the Sun which was set in a block of flats in Bombay – were adaptations of novels. Back then, there was still subsidy available, so one show led to another.

“That went on for several years. We didn’t think about this ‘company’ per se – we just thought about the next show. Then in 1993, Oxfam approached us to do something connected with their work for their 50th Anniversary. Out of that came, Women of the Dust, a play inspired by Sunil Gupta’s photographs of the women labouring on construction sites in India.”

But it was the success of Ayub Khan Din’s celebrated play, East is East, which Tamasha first brought to the stage in 1996, that proved the real turning point.

“That play went mad and at that point we decided to accept that Tamasha was a company and not just a successions of projects.”

At this point, for the first time, they applied for fixed term funding from the Arts Council. Landon-Smith was becoming serious about the directing side of things, and also about teaching. So Tamasha began to develop a training side, which has now grown into Tamasha Developing Artists (TDA).

TDA, which was formally launched in 2004, is an artist-led professional development programme for emerging and established talent. It offers training courses, workshops, masterclasses, bursaries and ongoing professional support, and aims to ‘train and nurture the artistic individuality of the theatre voices of tomorrow, and to take positive action to encourage greater diversity in British theatre.’ It now represents fifty percent of Tamasha’s business.

Bhuchar has worked as actor, playwright and artistic director. Does her heart lay with one of those roles, or does she see them as interconnected?

“It has all come out of being young and Asian in this country. When we were growing up, we thought what we were experiencing, only we were going through it. Then my sister and I went to a Diwali function at Tara. They were doing sketches about the generation gap and questioning religion and our parents and racism.

“It was all those things that led you to hang out with people like yourself, which somehow led to acting. And then the writing came out of a lack of opportunities as an actor. And the need is still there.

“But I never woke up one day and thought ‘I’m going to be a pioneer.”

Does she think it would it be harder to start something like Tara now?

“It is harder, because the funding it not there. On the other hand, nowadays there are unpaid opportunities like development and scratch nights.

“In the 80s, if you went to the National Film Theatre to see a Satyajit Ray film, everyone you knew would be there. Now there is a lot more going, yet it is still on the margins. It is hard to see proper change, proper shaking up of the mainstream.

“For a while, there a wave both in theatre and in television. I was in an all-Asian programme on Central television that went out at seven thirty in the evening. Yes it was a niche programme with a niche audience. But now there is an assumption that we are all integrated. You have your Asian family on Eastenders and Emmerdale and sure, fine. But the community has grown enormously and the representation is abysmal. So people like me go, ‘Oh, my god, where is the tangible difference?’

“If Tamasha has branched out over the years, it is not because the need to represent South Asian voices has diminished. Rather, we have branched out because we recognised that need was shared by many other groups too. We used to have courses for British Asian writers only, and then we would have others knocking on our doors, saying ‘there is no other place for us – can we be British Asian for the day?’ So we started to ask ourselves why we were creating these barriers.

“Now, someone has said to us that being in a Tamasha rehearsal room is like being on the top of a London bus and actually there are no other places like that.”

Landon-Smith went back to Australia in 2013, and now Bhuchar herself is looking to move on too. So why now?

“We used to say Tamasha was Kristine and me and if we didn’t want to carry on, we would fold up and someone else could start something new. But with the growth of TDA, we realised Tamasha had grown beyond the two of us. And once you acknowledge something has outgrown you, then you start thinking how and when you will be succeeded.

“We had talked about 25 years being the right time to move on. Then she was headhunted for a wonderful job in Australia. [Landon Smith is now a lecturer in acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts, in Sydney.] We were in the first year of a three year plan for Tamasha, and it made sense for me to stay on. It was very important for us to pass on the identity of the company, its legacy, its history, to someone who had time to be embedded. Finn Kennedy was appointed through a huge open process. And now he and I are coming towards the end of an eighteen month process of working together.”

So what does the future hold for Tamasha?

“Finn talks about ‘making work along cultural fault lines’ - whether that is race or class or religion. He has had ten years as writer-in-residence at Mulberry School for girls in Tower Hamlets. He has changed the culture of that school, from a time when girls were not allowed to be in a drama group, to taking an all Muslim cast in a play written by him to the Edinburgh Festival.

“Finn was also behind ‘In Battalions,’ a report into the effect of Arts Council cuts on theatres' capacity to develop new plays and playwrights. That came about in response to a conversation with Culture Minister, Ed Vaisey, in which he claimed the cuts were having ‘no effect.’ That has been like a call to arms.

“So he is someone very passionate. Quite political. And he is a writer. So maybe things will become a little more writer-focused.”

And what lies in the future for Sudha Bhuchar?

“That is hard to answer, because I don’t have a new job to go to.

“My job has been about nurturing other artists, about administration, about fundraising. I want to catch my breath, think about myself. I am not a teacher in the way that Kris and Finn are. I want to be creating work.

“Part of our work over the last three years has been under the umbrella of Small Lives, Global Ties. I guess I will always be interested in ordinary people leading extraordinary lives. So I will be exploring new collaborations to tell those stories.

“I do have a couple of projects in mind. One is called Golden Hearts, which is about the fact that Asian men are particularly vulnerable to heart disease. That began as a Scratch Night and then I realised I needed to do something more with it. I am hoping to work with the British Heart Foundation on that.

“The other is an adaptation of White Mughals by William Dalrymple (the true story of a love affair between a British army officer and a Muslim woman in 18th Century India). I am trying to get that off the ground with a company called Dash Arts, who did a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in eight different Indian languages!

“But the whole thing is predicated on getting partners and getting money. So we will see. Maybe I will just decide to go and do yoga and recharge my batteries for a while!

“As one of the TDA artists told me, ‘Jump off a cliff and the universe will be there to catch you.’”



East is East is being revived in the West End this autumn. Read more here.

And you can read about the development of Sudha Bhuchar’s play My Name Is... here.


We hope to have an interview with Finn Kennedy, Tamasha’s incoming Artistic Director, in a future issue of Words with Jam.