An evening with British-Asian actor Sudha Bhuchar and her conversations
From saag gosht to Wimbledon, the actor's list of life experiences is long and worthy of remembering
Last night, I had the opportunity to visit London’s Soho Theatre and watch British-Asian actor, Sudha Bhuchar perform her Evening Conversations. Thanks to actor Riz Ahmed’s Instagram stories, I found out about this performance, and while I am yet to watch Sudha Bhuchar in a movie / drama, the fact that the first line of the show read, “You’re the one with the identity crisis mum, not us!” was capturing enough for me to bookmark it.
Soho Theatre has a cabaret-style venue, with a small stage surrounded by round tables and chairs all positioned to face the performer. A soft red light spotlighting SoHo Theatre on main wall of the stage, with a director’s chair placed in the centre of it that read Mary Poppins Returns. Next to it was a round wooden table with a pint glass filled with water. A small red luggage trolley, a rolled up yoga mat, three yoga blocks, lay quietly at the left end of the stage.
My friend and I got seated right next to the right side of the stage, and for once we wondered if we’ll only get to see Sudha Bhuchar’s left profile as she spoke, but how wrong were we. She made sure she looked into our eyes on so many occasions as she turned towards us while doing her monologue.
Once the audience was seated, the lights dimmed out and Sudha Bhuchar walked up to the stage, wearing a comfortable looking light olive green coloured cardigan and even more comfortable looking lead coloured pants. Bhuchar is a 60-year old “slasher” as she called herself. “I’m an actor slash playwright slash artistic director slash…” The first thing she did as she sat in her chair, was pull out a transparent plastic bag with makeup. The bag was worn out and crumpled (clearly not a prop), as she began her monologue while getting make-up ready on stage.
As a woman of Indian heritage addressing a crowd of at least fifty percent with Brown ethnicity, Sudha intelligently used anecdotes that brought distinct memories of one’s relationship with make up. She deftly pulled out the “stubborn brown” kajal stick and lined her eyes. The benign warts that would not accompany her forever, the forehead lines, and finally the face in her broken heart-shaped mirror that made her look so much like her mother. By the time, Sudha finished her make up routine, the crowd knew what it was getting into.
The monologue in part was a result of her spending time with her two millennial sons during the pandemic, but as she explored themes of middle-class upbringing and values, identity, mixed cultures, racism, heritage and feminism, and everything else that spanned the length of her life she chose to share.
When speaking about naming her sons, she subtly underlined the Indian-Punjabi-Pakistani-Muslim-British criterion was considered. She spoke of her family’s migration from India to Tanzania back to India and then to the UK, marrying a Pakistani-Muslim, Bheeshma’s story in Mahabharata, Rishi Sunak and Modi in the same vein, none of which felt forced or out of context.
What was particularly remarkable was her ability to not fixate on one theme rather weave the themes together and not get lost in one or the other. Humour was the glue that she regularly used to break away from one segment to the other.
“I’m afraid of the ‘F’ word,” Bhuchar remarked at one point.
“No, not fuck,” informing us how scientists have proved that using such words to express out one’s stress helps in staying healthy, and then encouraging us all to scream it out.
“No, the word is feminism,” she said.
She asks her sons, “Am I a feminist?”
Sudha did not leave out the tragedy and pain from her story, which envelopes one’s life and decisions in so many ways, but we often want to strike out for cause of discomfort. When she recounted her father’s sudden passing and his experience of getting rejected to teach ‘O’ level students in the UK, despite having taught students for Oxford and Cambridge admissions for nearly 20 years in Africa, the brutality of racism hit harder. The audience was quiet, discerning and silently reeling in her pain and her father’s.
Time to time, she brought back her relationship with other women, especially her mother, opening up a milieu of topics and experiences that every woman would connect in some way or the other. She spoke about inter-generational trauma, a revelation that she had through her own counselling experiences. Despite having experienced a very different time and age of challenges, her words brought a sense of comfort to me, reminding me how ill-understood trauma and love still are in most Brown families.
Her monologue was a masterclass in observational writing, which requires one to simply pay attention even to things that many times go unnoticed, like the writing on a three-wheeler auto-rickshaw that Sudha took in Mumbai several years ago. It was this writing that suddenly felt her more at home with India than other things.
By the end of the monologue, Sudha Bhuchar left everyone with a successful attempt at the Bhishmasana yoga pose and a heart filled with comfort and solace of bravely sharing one’s story.
Mariyam Haider is a researcher-writer and spoken word artist based in Singapore, producing work across themes of feminism and social justice. Her writings and research have been published in Midnight’s Borders by Suchitra Vijayan, Tata Institute of Cancer Research, Scroll, Asian Review of Books, Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, Livemint, among others.
Mariyam produces and hosts ‘Main Bhi Muslim’ podcast, which offers a space to diverse people from the Indian Muslim community to share their experiences.
She is the researcher of former FT journalist James Crabtree’s ‘Billionaire Raj’ (2018), and science journalist Angela Saini’s upcoming book ‘The Patriarchs’ (2023).
Yeh dil mange more ❤️