Renovating My Beautiful Laundrette for the 21st Century

Leeds Playhouse, 15^th-26^th October 2019

Written and adapted by Hanif Kureishi, directed by Nikolai Foster. Performed by Curve Theatre.

*Contains spoilers*

Watch our archive recording of Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette

When Hanif Kureishi’s and Stephen Frears’ film of My Beautiful Laundrette burst onto the scene in 1985, sexy, bawdy, gritty and violent, it shook up audiences with its representations: British Asians were depicted as card-playing, booze-swilling businessmen “keeping this damned country in the black” at the height of Thatcherism, and a gay National Front skinhead fell for a “brown boy trying to make it in a white world” (Kureishi in conversation). It was a time of divisions: mass unemployment but a new enterprise economy culture that told you that if you dreamt big enough, worked hard enough and knew how to “squeeze the tits of the system” you could make it. It played with its audience, who were rooting for the success of the “Ritz among Laundrettes”, whilst probably hating everything its success stood for. The endemic racism and xenophobia in British society was foregrounded, but nevertheless the film didn’t go down so well with the Bradford Twelve (Kureishi, Bradford, Granta). Maybe, for a brief period in the new millennium, it would have seemed a period piece, but now in 2019, it seems it is again a play for today.

Perhaps that is why Kureishi and Nikolai Foster of Leicester’s Curve Theatre have decided to renovate My Beautiful Laundrette, taking its Oscar nominated screenplay and augmenting it for the stage. I saw it during its current run at the also newly renovated Leeds Playhouse. I have to admit, I had some trepidations. After all, I had lived and breathed the film for a significant period (I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on it in 1990) and when I first saw it in my sitting room as a teenager in the mid-80s it quite literally changed my life (See My LGBT icons here). What if I didn’t like it?! The reviews for the play were mixed – but in a good way (The Daily Telegraph hated it, The Guardian loved it). As for me? I’m off to see it for my third, and alas, final time tomorrow.

As Papa says, it’s all about Omar, and although the set design and music is fabulous (“I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money” sing the Pet Shop Boys in the play’s soundtrack), it’s the casting that makes this production shine. Omar Malik and Jonny Fines play Omar & Johnny (yes, really, although sharing a character’s name wasn’t actually a prerequisite of getting an audition). They both absorb those iconic film roles but they take ownership of them, too. There are reflections of Gordon Warnecke & Daniel Day Lewis in costume, tone, gesture throughout – Johnny’s black and orange donkey jacket, Omar trimming his nostril hair in the mirror, and each of them telling the other with genuine passion “I want you” even if they are not 100% sure what else they want. At times, even the actors’ pauses in a sentence echo the sound of the dialogue in the film. Yet Fines’ Johnny is vulnerable, reflective, and emotionally open in a way Day Lewis’ never was. He’s cool, yes, but only sometimes. He’s also often unsure of himself, and frequently, frankly, soppy with love. Malik’s Omar is worldly, confident, less tender, especially toward his father, and more ambitious than Warnecke’s. He’s also more aware of himself as a gay man. And if anyone has any lingering scepticism over the nature and depth of their love for each other, the play makes that explicit.  They share a deep cleaning fetish.

(Omar and Jonny talk about playing Omar and Johnny with Nikolai Foster here:)

The casting of Gordon Warnecke, Omar in the 1985 film of My Beautiful Laundrette, as his own Papa, was a genius bit of casting. “My own father was a socialist, too,” Warnecke said. “I wanted to put him into my performance” (in conversation). I always thought his slightly gawky performance made the film, a perfect balance to Day Lewis’ effortless smoothness. Warnecke really became that boy who failed his exams twice but wasn’t going to be “ beat down by this country”. Now, like the rest of us, he is thirty plus years older. Thus, his performance of Papa is a beautiful homage to Roshan Seth, but also suggests an older, jaded Omar if life had not turned out well, perhaps… “Who knows what could happen to them in the future? It could all have gone so wrong in a few years’ time as it did for so many” (Warnecke in conversation). They are, after all, investing in our boom bust economy.

Meanwhile Balvinder Sopal mesmerised as white teen boy racist Moose. This isn’t colour-blind, gender-blind casting; this is a statement, and a statement about who can play what in this country here and now. In the context of this particular production, which is all about pushing through boundaries, it’s bloody brilliant. With Paddy Daly as Ghengis, a swastika and a crucifix tattooed onto his head, they humanise the white non-working class, despite their pamphlet rhetoric, duped by the National Front propaganda they peddle, dispossessed & belonging nowhere. The St George’s flag in Moose’s back pocket worryingly references today’s English Defence League. This production references religion, both a cultural Islam and a politicised, nationalist appropriation of Christianity, echoing the larger perceptions of “culture wars” in a post-Rushdie affair world in a way that the film didn’t (see Kureishi on “why its time for a fresh spin at the laundrette” here). But as Kureishi has always made clear, it’s not just the poor and underprivileged who are to blame. Moose’s placard “British Jobs for British Workers” references Gordon Brown’s controversial statement only a few years ago, now appropriated by Brexiteers in their anti-European rhetoric. Unlike Papa, I’m not yet scared on the streets for my own dual heritage children, but I was horrified to hear of an incident experienced by my British East Asian daughter in a London shopping centre not long ago. Followed into a lift by a man demanding to know where she came from she rolled her eyes and said “Yorkshire”. He became angry, she should have known that wasn’t what he meant. “Oh come on, Mum,” she said to me on the phone afterwards. “You can’t ignore it. It happens all the time.” When I spoke to Kureishi about my dissertation – I was an overly serious young feminist and wannabe lesbian – he pointed out that I had a tendency to over-privilege the queer story line at the expense of the issues round race and racism that the film explored. I get what he means now.

(Balvinder Sopal and Paddy Daly on their roles:)

One of the central scenes in the film is Omar’s first meeting with Johnny and his gang. The fascists throughout the film look white – not E. M. Forster’s pinko-grey, but deathly white, anaemic. Their skin is like dough. As Omar, Cherry and Salim wait in their car at traffic lights, one of the National Front gang slides down the windscreen, face pressed against it, distorting flesh. Another drops his trousers and presses his buttocks against the glass, into Cherry’s face. They look like gargoyles. I wondered how this could possibly be re-enacted on the stage. But here Grace Smart’s set came into its own, the shadows of the scaffolding emphasising the sense of threat in the scene, the actors menacingly appearing from those shadows, everything deserted. Johnny loomed above, alone.

Smart did similar wonders with the laundrette, her double-sided washing machines swinging from grunge to glory in a moment.

Balvinder Sopal reappears as Bilquis, not the illiterate village woman of the film, but an articulate woman with traditional values trying & failing to see eye to eye with her rebellious daughter Tania, played by Nicole Jebeli, as they work out to Jane Fonda. The extra hour the stage affords this production (over the time given to a low budget film) largely gets turned over to the women, who come in from the margins. Tania’s plight in particular is voiced – she doesn’t just want to watch Bollywood films, but to make them, or at least run away to Leeds to be an Art student, “as far away from civilisation as I can get!” This got big laughs in Leeds, of course! All of this is hinted at in the film through close-ups of Rita Wolf’s face, which was not only incredibly beautiful but incredibly expressive, too. One lifting of her eyebrows said it all. In the less visually intimate space of the theatre, significant extra dialogue is given over to Tania to rail against her family’s expectations and to plot her path to living her own life. She, much more than Omar, voices what it is to live on the borderline. As the play reaches its denouement she steps centre stage, sharing Johnny & Omar’s space, the third point in their triangle. She is “as my character, Papa, says in the play, the real revolutionary” (Warnecke).

Race and identity is deftly explored through Kammy Darweish’s Nasser & Hareet Deol’s Salim. In the play, they are businessmen of different generations & classes, both making it in Thatcher’s new enterprise economy, the latter as a drug dealer – “the purest form of capitalism”, he states. However, Deol’s youth & brashness covers up insecurities not so far from Ghenghis’. He’s a poor cousin, not only lifted up by Nasser, but about to be usurped by Omar. Unlike Derek Branche’s Salim, he certainly doesn’t appear to have “one of the best collections of recent Indian art” hanging on his walls and it’s unlikely he would also “patronize many painters”.

(Hareet Deol on playing Salim:)

Then there is Cathy Tyson as Rachel, completely re-imagining the role as a black woman navigating layers of racism, as she and Nasser represent the other mixed-race relationship in the show. Since the original My Beautiful Laundrette, Section 28 has been and gone, the Equality Act has recognised our rights as LGBTQ people, and Johnny and Omar can now get married (I want to see that film, Hanif Kureishi!). Asian and Afro-Caribbean relationships are still culturally taboo, however, and LGBTQ Muslim visibility is only just beginning to be discussed more broadly. Tyson’s Rachel is more cynical in love than Shirley Anne Field’s. In fact, through Saeed Jaffrey’s and Field’s performances, Nasser and Rachel were the other big love story in the film, and their break-up was heart-breaking. Tyson’s Rachel has a much greater sense of self-worth, however, and the moment her partner pretends she is his short-hand typist she decides to move on. She is also more active in sisterly solidarity as a great twist is added to the end of the play, and she gives Tania, the girl she has spent years “hearing” about but never meeting, a lift to the station. Their friendship, as Rachel helps Tania to be a woman who doesn’t have to live off (or live for) men, was a clever response to one of the ironies of the film (although Rita Wolf’s Tania worked out for herself that she didn’t need anyone to help her). I also loved it that it was Warnecke’s Papa who told Tania that choosing which cousin to marry didn’t have to be her only choice, and that he gave his blessing to Omar moving out to live with Johnny.

When my friends saw it with me last week we discussed how this play seemed as much about where we are now as a society as it was also about the 80s. Alas, we have gone full circle. Apart from in LGBTQ rights, of course. My Beautiful Laundrette was one of the last happily ending queer films for about two decades as AIDS came to dominate gay narratives. Francis Lee returned to its spirit in God’s Own Country, citing it as an influence on his hopeful ending. The play had a certain chastity to it compared to the film, perhaps because the British stage, unlike British screen, has a certain chastity to it anyway. It playfully engaged with some of these differences, however, through lashings of innuendo, with Johnny and Omar lasciviously discussing “a lick …. a lick …. a long lick of paint” they planned to give the laundrette (“a nice duck-egg blue”, insists Johnny), conjuring up what is one of the sexiest scenes in queer cinema, whatever your orientation. There’s even a clip of it on Youtube. The politics of the erasure of male gay bodies as sexual bodies is a discussion for another day (if you don’t know what I mean, note how often in film, even recent films such as Call Me By Your Name, the camera still pans to the window rather than show gay men having sex). However, although the film’s sex scene was taken offstage in this play, the production was far from coy about its central characters’ sexuality, explored through banter, through touch, through the language of love. This play is gay.

For me, the fact that My Beautiful Laundrette is playing to schools in a post Section 28, pro-gay marriage society, says how far we’ve come. Curve Theatre had a schools outreach project with De Montforth University and at least one GCSE group teacher tweeted about it on Twitter. The film changed my life as a young queer teen in the 80s and the play affirms it now. So thank you to all the casts and creatives. I love you all. xx

Curve in Conversation:

Some interesting links:

My Beautiful Laundrette archive at The British Library

Channel 4 and Film on Four

My review of Francis Lee’s Gods Own Country is here.

Play trailer here if you’re having problems with the sound