The Stage

Behud (Beyond Belief)

Published Friday 16 April 2010 at 16:35 by Jason Best

Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s 2004 play Behzti (Dishonour) had its run at the Birmingham Rep notoriously curtailed after the city’s Sikh community took exception to its depiction of rape and murder in a gurdwara (a Sikh temple).

Amid violent protests outside the theatre and threats against the author’s life, Bhatti went into hiding and the play was cancelled on “health and safety grounds”.

Six years on, Bhatti returns to the fray with a new play, Behud (Beyond Belief), a fictional re-creation of the uproar surrounding Behzti that teases together personal experience, heated dialectic and formal playfulness into an entertaining, if uneven, whole.

When we encounter Bhatti’s dramatic surrogate, Chetna Pandya’s harassed author, Hannah Clark’s striking white box of a set could be the inside of the writer’s mind as she struggles to master the situation.

Hence the first characters we meet, a Sikh police officer and his white superior, go through comic contortions at the writer’s bidding.

Yet the author doesn’t retain control of her creations. At first she moves unseen amid her characters, who include the beleaguered theatre’s artistic director (John Hodgkinson), a pair of young firebrands (Ayin Shah and Shiv Grewal), Ravin J Ganatra’s aggrieved community leader and Priyanga Burford’s sleek news reporter.

When Lucy Briers’ scheming local councillor gets out of line, Pandya’s puppet-master of an author ruthlessly puts her through a couple of undignified pratfalls, but as the action unfolds the writer finds events overwhelming and sidelining her.

Bhatti’s Pirandellian conceit is a clever way of dramatising her situation, and Lisa Goldman’s brisk production and the excellent cast make the most of her contrivances. As Bhatti intends, several of the actors double-up roles, which produces some amusing combinations, as when Hodgkinson’s bluff copper exits through one door to return moments later through another as the effete director.

In the end, however, it’s Bhatti’s own confusions and doubts that colour the play. And although she allows different voices to air competing views, Behud ultimately comes across as personal catharsis rather than genuine debate.

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