Eleanor Field’s set suggests impermanence and transition: a metal container is surrounded by piles of suitcases. A fitting site for stories of forced migration and resettlement. In August 1972, the military dictator Idi Amin announced that all Asian people who were not Ugandan citizens would be given 90 days to leave the country. Of the 50,000 or so who held British passports, about 30,000 were received in to the UK. Many came to Leicester, sensibly ignoring adverts placed in newspapers by the council, advising them against relocating to the city. To mark the 50th anniversary of those events, Curve commissioned Chandni Mistry, Ashok Patel and Dilan Raithatha to write short plays based on accounts of the lived experiences of local people. I caught two of the productions, presented as a double bill.
Patel’s Ninety Days is set mainly in Kampala, in the lead up to the expulsion. The story follows a daisy chain of encounters among four closely interconnected characters: Joshua (Nathan Obokoh) is a soldier in Amin’s army; Wynnie (Chisenga Malama), his girlfriend, works for Geeta (Sneya Rajani) and her businessman husband, Sudesh (Rav Moore). Through their personal interactions, Patel movingly and unflinchingly exposes political, economic and racial tensions between the black and Asian communities in Uganda’s capital.
In Raithatha’s Call Me By My Name, Leicester-bred Danny’s (Manas Kotak) confusion about how to describe his ethnicity for a university application form is the prompt for a series of stories from his grandfather (Nicholas Alphonso Pereira) and great uncle (Jishnu Soni). The action switches smoothly between naturalistic present and expressionistically rendered past as the older men wrangle about what to tell and what to leave unsaid (“Don’t mention the dead bodies in the lake”), and reveal the racism that, as the title indicates, they confronted in the UK.
With crisp, insightful direction from Mandeep Glover, multifaceted choreography from Kesha Raithatha and attention-grabbing performances from the 30-plus, community-based company, the dramas drive home the thought expressed by Wynnie and Geeta at the close of Ninety Days: “White, brown, black – the difference between us is so small. Why does it take so long to understand that?”
