“Amina Aaliya Beg crafts a hilarious and heartfelt show with an intelligent use of tech”
Conceived in 2023 at the Contact theatre in Manchester, since going on to do an Edinburgh fringe run in 2025, Amina Aaliya Beg’s My Mum Told me not to Marry an Atheist recently made its London debut at the Camden People’s Theatre for a work in progress show. At this point in its development, the production has already seen a definite upgrade, and its performance on Thursday showed boundless promise.
A one woman show starring Aaliya Beg, the show follows a DJ radio host, Didi, as she tries to connect with her daughter Kamal. The setup is already excellent, with a red telephone plugged into her decks, on which she takes calls with her daughter and uses as headphones, an incredibly clever piece of set design. The use of audio was solid here too, rewinding her daughter’s dialogue to show a level of control over their conversations, as well as a moment changing the pitch of her daughter’s voice to reveal it to be very much like her own. This is Didi’s show, and it feels like we are in safe hands.
The way she manages a room is invigorating to be a part of. Interacting with the crowd, they become her daughter’s atheist boyfriend, making for humorously awkward interactions. It’s a great positioning of the audience, one that Aaliya Beg could afford to be even more demanding with. This is the main point of development I think could be improved—simply taking more time with it, enjoying the command of the room, with stronger projection to make her story clear and the audience feel a little more interrogated. It’d be great to hear more stories from Didi about her own upbringing, as she clearly feels a kinship with her daughter that her daughter seems to not understand. “Does she think I was not young once?” she asks at one point. This feels like a central line to the whole story.
The show contains a critique of Western understandings of sexuality and importing of homophobia that feels compelling. It is this which drives a wedge between her and her daughter’s relationship. Bringing the scope of such a global critique into the home to show how it directly affects familial relationships grounds it in something personal and relatable. This is the most powerful way of making this kind of critique.
It is this, as well as its well-crafted humour, which makes Aaliya Beg’s play one worth following. Its narrative is incredibly unique. It is not pandering, and yet feels universally affective, and its ending results in a moment of really organic audience participation that is incredibly difficult to achieve. But Aaliya Beg accomplishes this, and by the end, you can really feel the room of people you’re in.
‘My Mum Told me Not to Marry an Atheist’ plays again at Camden People’s Theatre on March 24th.