The first two-thirds of Iman Qureshi’s cheerful comedy about a lesbian choir could translate wholesale into a feelgood British film, like The Full Monty or Military Wives. The last chunk has a harder edge: most of the mismatched characters get a moment in the spotlight to express passionate views on the ways race, disability, and transexual rights impact on the lives of queer women. The plotting and characterisation are heavy handed and Hannah Hauer-King’s production isn’t exactly subtle, but altogether it’s a charming, funny and inclusive piece of work, augmented by uplifting a capella versions of songs ranging from Carmina Burana to Petula Clark’s Downtown.
It begins with Kibong Tanji’s broadband engineer Lori fixing the router of Lara Sawalha’s Dina, a rich but aggressively flirtatious Qatari with an overbearing husband and two children. Dina suspects she is gay and wants to meet women: by chance, Lori is about to be dragged to a lesbian singing session by her partner Ana (Claudia Jolly), in a bid to save a relationship that’s at the tricky seven-year mark. Lori is black and hasn’t come out to her churchgoing family, while Ana is white, bisexual, and a lecturer in post-colonialism and queer studies. See what I mean about the clunkiness?
The choir is rounded out by promiscuous Ellie (Fanta Barrie), trans woman Brig (Mariah Louca), and Fi (Kiruna Stamell), who is a person of restricted growth and the most complex and interesting figure on stage. They’re hectored into rough shape by jolly-hockey-sticks choirmistress Connie, a self-described OWL (older, wiser lesbian). The vocal warmups are very funny, the singing voices sweetly harmonious if credibly ordinary. But the increasingly leaky state of their rehearsal hall stands as a metaphor for the fault lines fracturing the choir and the wider lesbian community.
Although created as cookie-cutter receptacles for Important Issues, the characters are vivid – especially Tanji’s warm-hearted Lori, and Stamell’s feisty Fi – and more importantly, fun. Though schematic, Qureshi’s writing has an acerbic wit as she tears through the truisms of female same-sex relationships: the cats, the fleece-wearing, the visits to Ikea. Ellie is criticised for sleeping with straight women. “Girl’s gotta eat,” she ripostes. Fi’s drunken speech raging against the world is a terrific piece of writing and a thrilling foregrounding of a disabled gay woman.
Qureshi asks what it says about life for queer women in a UK if “there’s a rainbow flag in every high street window but no lesbian bar” in most towns. Her play delves boldly into issues of transphobia and homophobia but it has a generous, open spirit. After playing a series of crass, hostile idiots, the only man in the cast, Fayez Bakhsh is redeemed with the role of a kind, gauche workman, proffering a tissue to a tearful Ana while asking if she’s having “boy trouble”. And when the scattered and angry characters reunite to sing Bridge Over Troubled Water, it’s deeply moving.
