But what did Fatima do next?

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

What Fatima Did… was adopt the veil, to the amazement of her teenage classmates and friends. This sharp, fast-moving play shows what happened next.

Writer Atiha Sen Gupta has been attentive, both in the Hampstead Theatre’s Young Company and on North London buses and trains.

“I remember sitting on a bus”, she recalls, “on the way to a music lesson in Willesden when a middle-aged Irishman started shouting at me, something alone the lines of ‘paki… terrorist… she knows where Bin laden is’, something like that. It didn’t even make sense. The irony was that ten, twenty years before, he as an Irishman would have been seen by an ignorant public as the symbol of terrorism. Individual moments like that reflect big shifts in the political landscape. Maybe that pungent racism has faded since then, but up to about two years after 9/11 I felt a real sense of being an Asian and sticking out, sitting in tube carriages and not being treated like I was two years before.”

Sen Gupta has crystallised and compressed such experiences and imaginings into 90-minutes. It packs a punch – and a lot of laughs. (“She looks like a fundamentalist post box.”)

She is a talented writer, and the cast do her proud. If you want a quick, dramatised, entertaining run-through of the arguments for and against veiling, this is it.

What does she herself think? “I think the hijab as an issue has become very polarised: it causes either a very reactionary racist opinion, with people saying ‘they shouldn’t wear it, they’re in England now’, or you find the opposite, liberal middle class opinion of ‘it’s their culture, we shouldn’t meddle in their affairs’.

“We need to find somewhere in the middle, we need to be able to talk about it, we need to bring feminism into it, we need to bring Muslim women who don’t wear the hijab into it. I think it should be a much more sophisticated debate and it isn’t at the moment. People are either afraid to talk about it or just very damning of the hijab. There is no middle ground.”

In her programme notes she compares her central theatrical trick – an absent character – to The Glass Menagerie, but it follows a precedent set by another young writer of Indian origin: Anupama Chandrasekhar’s play, Free Outgoing, at the Royal Court Theatre. The girl at the centre of that play, 15-year-old Deepa, never appears on stage. As with Fatima, the device takes the focus away from the obvious "Why did she do it?" to the impact on those around her.

Both plays end with the audience’s eyes fixed on the door of the room in which the young woman at the centre of the storm has hidden herself away. Then the door opens…

At that point, we know what Fatima did. But we still don’t know why, or what Fatima did next.

* What Fatima Did… is at the Hampstead Theatre until 7 November.