From the Black Death to Covid
Photo by Tarun Jasani
Daniel Nelson
From the Black Death to Covid, BreaDth sets out to dramatise pandemics and the lives of older people and the racial minorities who care for them.
The interviews which “informed” Raminder Kaur’s script were collected by researchers for the Consortium on Practices of Wellbeing and Resilience among Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Families and Communities. That’s impressive, too.
But the imaginative attempt to bridge the millennia between Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Islamic philosopher who many credit with “inventing” the social sciences, and a contemporary British-Asian careworker, is asking too much - or perhaps not offering quite enough.
The expressive movements and rhetoric (“The great grief … I am sorely alone”) that attempt to conjure up the 1300s strike a vivid contrast with earthy exchanges between “key worker” Tahir and the elderly white racist Edie he helps in his brief, underpaid visits (older clients, he says, “have got a sort of Pensioners Prejudice Permit”).
Their funny, moving conversations and relationship (“I don’t want no bloody carer”/ “The insults come with the caring”), together with the scenes of Tahir’s family, are the guts of the play, and show that Kaur can write.
The dialogue gets a spark from a number of touchy issues, including, inevitably, Edie’s appropriation of Tahir to Terry.
I can’t help thinking that rather than stretching for a global historical drama ranging around time and place (“This plague paranoia, past, present and future”), Kaur would have produced a more penetrating work by focussing on the here and now. The impact of Covid on ethnic minorities, and vice versa, is a story in itself.
BreaDth, £16/£13 conc/ £10 previews, is at Omnibus Theatre, 1 Clapham Common Northside, SW4 0QW until 3 June. Info: https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/