MADE AT HOME (Tamasha)****

 

 

By Cal

Link: http://www.tamasha.org.uk/made-at-home---a-tamasha-virtual-scratch/

Available until: 16^th November 2020

Tamasha is a theatre company which works with emerging and established artists from culturally diverse backgrounds. Usually, like most companies, they perform their work on a stage. This year, like so many, they have moved online. Tanasha actually had a bit of an advantage over some of the other companies as they’d experimented with digital theatre last year so they had some experience to draw on, but I doubt that made it easy. Yet they’ve produced an hour and a half of varied, interesting and extremely good pieces of work on the theme of home.

The pieces presented are described as extracts of works in progress, but although some left me wanting more, the parts we do get to see feel complete in themselves. The plays are on a range of subjects, but one thing they have in common is that they cover difficult subjects and ask difficult questions. They are interesting and educational to watch, as well as being great stories with interesting characters.

I Never Got Your Recipe by Ruby Kitching is full of passion and has some really lovely descriptive language. Yasmine Dankwah has created a great central character for Mixtape Mind who is full of personality and has written a script which is poetic at times.

Hajira and Matty by Zara Azam is the one I identified with most. We are all different and I’m not saying that I’ve gone through what the characters have gone through. Matty’s experiences are very similar to mine on the surface, but different in other ways. What stood out to me is how much this play reminded me (not that it was very long ago) of being a teenager and trying to work out exactly who I was. Trying new things in order to determine whether that was me. We all have our own individual stories, but perhaps they all begin in a similar way – wondering who you are and who you’re going to be. This is a great story of identity and friendship.

In Home to Me, Sharan Atwal writes about some of the thoughts and feelings which are so difficult to put into words, but she has done it and created a painful but very honest play. Spank by Nkenna Akunna was an intriguing story about so much more than what was on the surface. Finally, Bela Kapur’s 269 and Counting is a deeply moving and emotional story. There are a lot of things in it which aren’t actually spelled out in the script, but you can see and hear it just as strongly as if it had been.

The actors are also extremely good. Hussina Raja impressed me particularly as she played such a wide range of characters of different ages and in different situations, but all the actors are talented and they do so well with saying an important line in a particular way that really hits you. Directors Robert Awosusi and Layla Madanat direct the actors remotely, but I was almost never aware of the limitations of this.

A very interesting and thought-provoking collection of plays.