An authentic exploration of the struggle with personal demons and histories, adding a refreshing complexity beneath a jovial surface
It’s London in the 1980s, and the mood is grim at the top of My Beautiful Laundrette, which opened at the Liverpool Playhouse on March 26th. The dimly-lit stage is all craggy grey-green walls, heady amounts of smoke and some scaffolding, with an auditory background of classic ’80s hits. As the audience sits chatting before the house lights go down, some cast members wander onstage, microcosms of disenfranchised and radicalised British youth in their boots and braces. They look around, they sit, and then they sleep. The ‘real’ start of the play is heralded by man in a sharp pink suit with an incredibly coiffed beard hopping a wall at the back of the stage to clear the squatters, thus beginning two hours of a fairly rollicking show.
Guileless Omar (Lucca Chadwick-Patel), a British-Pakistani teen, lives with his father in London during the Thatcher years. Palmed off to work for his rich Uncle Nasser to get him off the dole, Omar ends up taking on a barely-functioning laundrette. Living amidst the myriad tensions of England in the ’80s, Omar manages to halt a would-be gang attack on him and his Uncle’s right-hand man (the aforementioned pink-suited Salim, played by Hareet Deol), because he knows one of the gang members: Johnny, an old childhood friend, played by turns damaged and sweet by Sam Mitchell. The two are spotlit for this encounter, with Johnny atop the scaffolding and Omar looking up at him, a visual unavoidably reminiscent of Shakespeare’s famous balcony scene. Omar manages to recruit Johnny to work at the laundrette with him, and so begins their love story.
This is a show with no pause for breath – there are no end of plot lines, dealing with the massive topics of class, immigration, racism, women’s issues, and sexuality. These issues, all of which are as relevant today as when Hanif Kureishi wrote the original screenplay, are ably handled by a cast brimming with chemistry. They seem like old friends onstage – perhaps not surprising as a number of the cast are reprising their roles, with just a few newcomers slotting in seamlessly. This camaraderie is especially apparent and poignant in the interactions between Papa (Gordon Warnecke, who played Omar in the original Stephen Frears film) and Uncle Nasser (Kammy Darweish); I’d count their one-on-one scene towards the end of the play amongst the more moving of the show. Tending more towards the comedic, despite the heavy subject matter, the play has plenty of double entendres and one-liners to keep the audience entertained. At times the racist gang seems almost cartoonish, looming menacingly onstage brandishing hammers and shouting bigoted clichés – this said, Genghis’ (played by Paddy Daly) rendition of “There’ll Always Be an England” from atop the scaffolding was a key moment of sobering mood shift in the show.
The lenses through which this play can be watched are myriad, but a major through-line seems to me to be learning to shape one’s own life alongside (or despite) the influence of family. In renovating the laundrette, Omar and Johnny are building a life together, for which the decrepit business is a proxy: it’s not much, but it’s a start, and importantly for Omar, it is his. Throughout the play he sees the life paths encouraged by his family – his father values education, his Uncle, money – but must forge his own path. Few of the characters can be seen as purely good or purely bad, not least our cheerful protagonist: their struggles with their personal demons and histories are authentic, adding a refreshing complexity beneath the jovial surface. It’s ostensibly a love story, but that’s certainly not all this show has to offer.