Wednesday, June 1, 2016
It all begins so innocently and with such high-spirted puppyish energy, as if it’s just another acutely observed and smartly written streetwise coming of age story about the budding friendship between two teenage girls. But don’t be deceived, there is nothing cosy about Charlene James’s gripping, heartfelt and heartbreaking look at female genital mutilation (FGM) in the UK. This is often startlingly funny in its depictions of everyday life as seen through the eyes of a smart teenager, but it is also fuelled by an anger that really makes it fly. It is dedicated to the 500,000 women estimated to be living with the consequences of FGM in Europe, many in the UK.
Muna (Adelayo Adedayo), high-spirited and popular at her secondary school, loves Rihanna and seems to walk the streets as if she owns them. She’s excited about her six-year-old sister’s upcoming birthday. New girl Iqra (Tsion Habte) is shy and timid, still processing the deaths of her entire family in her native Somalia, and living with a woman she calls “auntie” in a concrete tower block where the lift is always out of order and the glass in the entrance door is shattered. Iqra is very concerned that a child playing may cut herself on that glass.
But when the girls make a chance connection on the bus, it turns out that they have more in common than they realised: Muna was originally from Somalia too, and she has a secret that she can’t share with her other friends, a secret that stops her even seeking help at the doctor. Worried that when her little sister turns seven she too will be mutilated, she confides in Iqra. But although Iqra’s experience of FGM in Somalia left her with emotional as well as physical scars, she argues that it’s tradition. “We do it because it is our culture. We have done it for so long. It is who we are. It has to happen.”
James clearly thinks it doesn’t, and so does British law. FGM has been illegal in the UK since 1985, but there has been only one (failed) prosecution in that time, and as Cuttin’ It puts it, there are still little girls lying in their own blood like some “messed up Sleeping Beauty” in the back bedrooms of ordinary homes. Mothers sometimes book their daughters in together, to take advantage of a group discount. There are many kinds of betrayal explored here.
The writing is always sharp and increasingly fierce and urgent, and the play unfurls almost like a thriller as Muna tries to save her little sister. The two young actors are outstanding, and Gbolahan Obisesan’s production, played out on Joanna Scotcher’s concrete wasteland design, is admirably restrained until its final harrowing minutes and devastating concluding image. See it and weep, and then do something.