Tormented visibility: Extremism, stigma, and staging resistance in Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif’s Homegrown

ABSTRACT

This article examines the circumstances surrounding the cancellation of Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif’s play Homegrown in 2015. Commissioned by the National Youth Theatre, it was unexpectedly cancelled days before it was due to open. This move can be attributed to heightened sensitivity towards so-called “extreme” opinions of the kind Homegrown features, as the British government tightened definitions of unacceptable speech and placed the onus on civil society bodies to police it. Yet, as this article argues, Homegrown’s treatment can also be understood in terms of the historical commissioning processes for minority – especially Muslim – theatre, which privilege certain topics and modes of address that result in marginal communities’ continued stigmatization. From the outset, Homegrown was alert to these constraints and sought to counter them through a radical refusal to conduct its debates in the manner approved by the framing conventions of security discourse and the governing etiquette of post-9/11 theatre.

KEYWORDS:

• Omar El-Khairy
• Nadia Latif
• Homegrown
• radicalization
• extremism
• British theatre

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. To the expanding ranks of Muslim prose writing mentioned by other contributors to this volume, we might add plays such as Ishy Din’s (2012) Snookered (with Tamasha); Avaes Mohammad’s (2015) Hurling Rubble at the Sun/Moon (with Park Theatre); Hassan Abdulrazzak’s (2016) Love, Bombs and Apples (with Turtle Key Arts); and Asif Khan’s (2017) Combustion (with Tara Arts).

2. The main funders for drama in the UK include Arts Council England, the National Lottery, and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Some funding exists for theatres along with grants for theatre companies, while smaller private foundations and trusts exist to support individual productions and performers. The larger players in this landscape are most directly involved in gatekeeping as their public accountability requires that they are cognizant of prevailing tastes and norms, even where they are committed to facilitating artistic expression.

3. Hesmondhalgh’s (2002) critique might be updated and further nuanced by acknowledging the growth of recent collaboration between high-profile theatre productions and cinemas which often screen performances, to say nothing of experimental theatre’s increased use of technological mediation, hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Both these developments complicate the picture of theatre as “low tech” and therefore at a remove from other media industries.

4. Vikram Dodd (2016, n.p.) reported widespread concern within the police force at the implications of the government’s spreading of responsibility for the identification of unacceptable radical speech. Police spokesmen warned of the potential to inadvertently create a “thought police”, stifling the freedoms they were supposed to be protecting.

5. De Waal (2018, 84) relates how Atiha Sen Gupta ([2009] 2012), author of What Fatima Did … attended a meeting with the literary manager and artistic director of the Hampstead Theatre armed with three different pitches, to find that they were only interested in the one about a young girl choosing to adopt the hijab for the first time.

6. Roaa Ali (2018) describes how the 2016 Arts Council England report on diversity continues to use categories allied to those “protected characteristics”, identified in the Equality Act of 2010, which are insufficiently nuanced to capture contemporary identity formations: “Minorities were reduced homogeneously to groups (BME, White, Unknown) and thus percentages [ … ] The data remains general and the criteria do not accommodate a detailed examination of ethnic minorities and their specific cultural representations” (276).

7. While overt racism is easy to identify, one of the play’s aims, according to Latif, was to critique the audience and to say: “You … you are the problem” (2019, 260).

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Notes on contributors

Peter Morey

Peter Morey is professor of 20th-century literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (2000); Rohinton Mistry (2004); Islamophobia and the Novel (2018); and, with Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 (2011). He has co-edited the volumes Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism (2006); Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (2012); Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism (2018), and Contesting Islamophobia (2019).