In a recent interview, the playwright Asif Khan said it is “very, very hard to be a Muslim person in the UK right now” but representation on stage can help, “I want to be able to write about my community honestly and truthfully, the good and the bad sides”.
I live in Birmingham where nearly a third of the population identified as Muslim in the 2021 census. The Birmingham Rep is doing sterling work bringing in new writers and a new audience, but how easy is it to write from a faith perspective and be ‘a Muslim writer’ rather than ‘a Muslim who writes’?
There has always been a relationship between theatre and religion. The ancient Greek tragedies were presented as part of the festival of Dionysus, and the medieval Mystery Plays took Bible stories out of the churches and into the streets. For many of us, the first time we saw a live performance will have been a school nativity play, and for a lot of actors, it will have been their first experience of acting, too, so the expression of faith through drama is nothing new.
In general, though, the British stage is secular, and it didn’t happen by accident. Strictly speaking, Britain is a theocracy: the head of state is also the head of the established church, Church of England bishops sit in the House of Lords and every parliamentary session in the Commons starts with prayers. If it doesn’t feel like a theocracy, that’s because, following the Reformation, the English stage was censored to avoid religious and political content.
Elizabeth I banned the medieval Mystery Plays for being too Catholic, and she promoted the Master Of The Revels, a role originally created by Henry VIII, to be a stage censor with instructions to ban all plays “wherein either matters of religion or of the gouernaunce of the estate of the common weale shalbe handled or treated”. The Long Parliament closed the theatres entirely in 1642 on religious grounds, and they stayed closed for the next eighteen years. The 1737 Licensing Act transferred censorship from the Crown to Parliament and from the Master Of The Revels to the Lord Chamberlain, with a particular emphasis on blasphemy and sedition.
In theory, since theatre censorship was abolished in 1968, playwrights have been free to talk about anything they like, including religion. The musical Jesus Christ Superstar! retold New Testament stories in an accessible, contemporary style, a bit like the Mystery Plays, and from A Man For All Seasons through Shadowlands to Racing Demon, Christianity has been variously celebrated and critiqued as a social institution and as a personal act of faith.
British Jews have explored what it means to be Jewish on stage, too. Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup With Barley, Steven Berkoff’s Kvetch, Ronald Harwood’s Collaboration andTaking Sides and Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt all explore the playwrights’ Jewish identity.
For the most part, though, UK playwrights stick to the 400-year-old convention that we don’t do God on the British stage, and when they do, it doesn’t always go well. In 1987, a planned Royal Court Theatre production of Jim Allen’s play Perdition was cancelled days before its first preview in response to accusations of anti-Semitism. In 2004, the run of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behzti (which translates from Punjabi as ‘Dishonour’) at The Birmingham Rep was cut short after protests from the local Sikh community. Jerry Springer: The Opera opened to rave reviews in London in 2003 but, following a BBC broadcast in 2004, an evangelical Christian group tried to prosecute the producers for blasphemy. They failed, but their protest campaign led to a third of the 2005 tour venues cancelling their booking and the producers lost a lot of money.
In recent years, there has been a heightened sensitivity around anything which might be interpreted as anti-Semitic or Islamophobic. In the absence of an official stage censor, the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act modified the 1986 Public Order Act to provide a legal remedy against any performance which, taken as a whole, is “likely to stir up racial or religious hatred”. Prosecutions are rare, but it has led to self-censorship. Last year, the Manchester Royal Exchange cancelled its production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream citing concerns about references to Israel and Gaza in the updated script.
So with that kind of baggage, how easy is it for Muslim playwrights to talk about Islam? In 2008, Michael Billington wrote an article in The Guardian asking where the new British Muslim playwrights were. At the time, there weren’t many, but they are starting to come through, supported, I’m pleased to say, by British Theatre Guide reviewers.
Playwrights like Rabiah Hussain, Sabrina Mahfouz, Farrah Choudhry, Emteaz Hussain, Zia Ahmed and Guleraana Mir are starting to talk about life as a British Muslim. And if you missed Asif Khan’s new play, Sisters 360, in London this month, you can catch it at Leeds Playhouse in May.
Islam, like other religions, has an uneasy relationship with theatre. Dramatic representation can default to unhelpful ‘Muslim women are oppressed victims, Muslim men are misogynistic bullies’ tropes, but if anything is going to correct it, it will be people like Khan and the new generation of Muslim playwrights writing from within their faith rather than looking at it from the outside.