Nimer Rashed - writer/director

When One Thinks…

A few days ago I read a review of Ishy Din’s new play Snookered, which has just started its run at the Bush Theatre. The play tells the story of a group of young British Muslims who meet for a game of pool on the anniversary of a friend’s death.

The Daily Telegraph review, by critic Charles Spencer, begins with the following paragraph:

When one thinks of young male Muslims in Britain today, I suspect the first image that comes to mind is of indoctrinated fanatics heading to London from the North with explosives in their rucksacks. That is doubtless an unfair mental picture, but after the carnage of the London bombs and the hatred routinely generated by jihadist preachers, it is a hard one to erase.

Although Mr. Spencer equivocates in his second sentence, he lands a dashing blow in his first. When one thinks of Muslims, he writes, one thinks of terrorists.

Perhaps, some might think, this is a legitimate thing to suggest. As he points out, however unfair this generalisation may appear, given the political concerns of the world after September 11, the anxiety of the ‘War on Terror’ and the horror of what happened in London seven years ago, when many people hear the word ‘Muslim’, the first image to appear on the flickering screen of their imagination is that of a fanatic.

I have no doubt that this may be true for some people. But my problem with these words is not only that they rehearse a dangerous cliché, encouraging and perpetuating a misguided consensus, but also that they’re part of a response to piece of theatre. 

When our brains start to process an idea, as any writer knows, the first words and images drawn from our imagination are likely to be the least trustworthy, the least original, and the most prone to generalisation. They’re facsimiles of experience: photocopies, counterfeits.

Consider the following:

When one thinks of Hollywood film producers, one thinks of…
When one thinks of girls from Essex, one thinks of…
When one thinks of jazz musicians, one thinks of…

Whatever images your mind conjures up, however vivid and three-dimensional they initially seem, I suspect that they are, if examined, utterly insubstantial. That’s what “when one thinks” encourages - not considered, deep thought or reflection, but a moment’s pause. A hasty skimming of the collective image banks. A quick-fix hit of an idea, plucked and torn from a second-hand scrapbook. 

Let’s continue. What does one think of Chinese people? Or Jamaican people? Cockney greengrocers? What about the French? The Germans? What about Jewish people? What about people who phone us up from India and tell us we’ve had an accident for which we should claim compensation? What about the woman in front of us in the queue at Sainsburys? What about theatre critics? What does one think about them? 

The problem with Mr. Spencer’s paragraph is that it takes the complex strands of experience, the connective tissue that links us together, and ties it into a tiny knot of hate. It acknowledges the divisiveness of “us and them” and, in its assumption that this is the de facto consensus, enshrines this oppositional position as absolute.

And it does all this with three little words. “When one thinks” is a pernicious phrase - it encourages prejudice without accountability. The inclusion of “one” (not “I”) carries an entitled assumption that this is the way we think: the common view, the status quo, shirking complexity in favour of cliché. “One” claims to speak for the many, but instead speaks for no-one in particular, and is wholly unaccountable. It is groupthink, and it is extremely dangerous.

We go to the theatre for many reasons, but among them is the hope that we might bear witness to the complexity of the world and see the multifaceted strands of experience (far too great for any one person to comprehend) channelled through the art and craft of a group of performers and artists into something comprehensible: a moment, a line, a scene, an act, a play. This is the point of all the rehearsals and all the learning of dialogue; all the babysitters and the Ticketmaster printouts and the bus rides and the hurried walks down wobbly pavements and the text messages and the awkward greeting of people you haven’t have seen for a while and the sideways “sorry, sorry”s shuffled down crowded aisles - all this preamble, this rigmarole, is the messy prelude to 90 minutes in the dark where we put our selves aside and submit to something else.

Which is why I find the first paragraph of Mr. Spencer’s review so sad – because theatre seems to have failed here. Despite watching and even enjoying the play, this review does not start with a personal acknowledgment that clichés and prejudice have been supplanted, that a worldview has been enlarged, that theatre has won a minor victory, but with a retreat to “when one thinks…”, a phrase that hides behind presumed common values, shrinks beneath the unaccountability of its assertion, and in the process obliterates any possibility of imaginative enquiry.

I am not a Muslim. My father is from the Middle East, and I acknowledge this might make me seem partisan. But the truth is that I’d react just as strongly to any piece of writing that began with the bald assertion that a million UK citizens can be reduced to such a divisive image - as would you. Could a mainstream newspaper start a review by making similarly broad statements about another racial group? Can you imagine an article beginning with the words “when one thinks of black people”? 

In the end, the Muslim terrorist cliché is not of Mr. Spencer’s creation, nor is it entirely unexpected that he should raise its spectre here – this boogeyman looms large over the cultural imagination: it permeates our news broadcasts, our documentaries, our novels and our dramas, and it has become emblematic of the prevailing anxiety of a nation uncertain of its legacy and its future identity. We live in interesting times, with porous borders and an osmosis of ideology so fluid that cultural unity seems impossible. Our citizenry is multinational. Our cultural baggage is heavy. Our connective tissue has grown knotted and confused.

Which is why it’s important that plays like Snookered are given due attention – so that the enemy du jour can be examined, and discarded. So that we – not “one” – can confront our prejudices head-on, and in the process take a step towards accepting the complexity that swirls around us. 

It’s disappointing that after his theatrical safari, this particular critic has started his review by coughing up the cold flesh of a dead idea. The good news is that Snookered is on for the next three weeks in Shepherds Bush, where its characters are very much alive, offering a depiction of contemporary British Muslim life that resists the cliché of fanaticism in favour of something else. It may be difficult to jettison cliché in favour of something other, something harder, but it’s essential if we’re to avoid the second-rate squalor of the un-imagination. This is what theatre can do, if we allow it. It’s why writers write, why audiences make their pilgrimage. To learn. To empathise. To grow. Otherwise we’re left with Mr. Spencer’s “mental pictures” that are “difficult to erase”: the indoctrination of cliché. And when one thinks of all the possibilities, really: who would opt for that?

2012 Update

Busy times make for a dusty website… So here goes, a quick update:

- I just finished making a new short film called The Ninety-Nine Percent. I shot it over a couple of days with some actor friends for submission to a competition, and have spent a lot of hours having fun putting it together on my ailing iMac… 

- I’m directing a short play as part of Theatre503’s Rapid Write Rewind season. Very exciting to be working with the brilliant writer Hannah Mulder again, and to return to Battersea’s powerhouse of new writing. 

- Possibly most exciting of all, I’ve been shooting films for the Royal Court’s upcoming Young Writers Festival - such a privilege to be hanging out at what is surely the coolest theatre in London (certainly the coolest bar). Will post links when films are complete!

And that’s about it for now…