15 Minutes Live at Theatre in the Mill

slung low

Back in March I attended 15 Minutes Live (a regular performance event made by Slung Low, at which four short plays for voices are recorded in front of a live audience) and wrote a review gushing about the event’s community spirit and telling you all that it was a delicious way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Nothing that happened at the latest incarnation of the event, which was commissioned by Theatre in the Mill and took place there on Sunday 19th May, has caused me to reconsider that position. If anything I enjoyed this most recent experience even more; mainly because it was warm enough inside Theatre in the Mill not to need a hot water bottle – which, as regular visitors to the Holbeck Urban Ballrooms will know, isn’t always the case at Slung Low’s HQ.

I attended Sunday’s 15 Minutes Live in the company of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, which I read on the train and during the interval (the Get Britain Fertile campaign has recently reignited my latent feminism).  I mention the book here because, as you’ll be aware, one does not experience things in a vacuum and my militant feminist mood served as a definite frame for my experience of the plays. I am happy to report that Slung Low get a big old green tick on the feminist front – three of the four plays featured women as central characters, and two of these (the two written by women) centred specifically on issues – pregnancy, marriage, divorce – which are fundamental features of feminist debate.

Initially, I was slightly sceptical about the subject matter of the first play, Stephanie Street’s Two for a While, which dealt with teenage pregnancy in Bradford’s Asian community, and touched on religion and honour killings – both of which are high-profile media ‘issues’. I tried my hardest to dislike the play for this focus (because I expected it to exploit sensationalist newspaper coverage) and I also tried to feel angry about the fact that female fertility was the subject of the work (I’d just read ‘The Wicked Womb’ section of Eunuch). In the end though the power of the writing, and of the reading by Zara Ahmadi, was such that I was utterly moved by the performance; it was just about all I could do to refrain from throwing myself on the floor and sobbing for my unborn children. And though I managed not to cry I know the piece really was that powerful because I noticed more than one woman in the row in front of me wiping away tears.

I also loved Irna Qureshi’s British, Muslim and Divorced. The play looked at cross-generational experiences of, and attitudes towards, marriage and divorce through letters between a divorced Pakistani-Muslim mother and her divorced British-born daughter. I particularly enjoyed the structure of the play, where the mother’s stoical, traditional vision of marriage was offered after her daughter’s letter attempting to justify her divorce and explain her need for future companionship. Structuring the story in this way meant that the mother’s experience was what we were left with. This allowed a more complex view of marriage, morality and culture to be offered than might have been possible if we had been left with her daughter’s liberal, modern take on these traditional values.

The other two plays were written by men, but nonetheless managed to be both funny and touching. I, Object was a surreal comedy about loneliness by John Hunter, and Dating for Godot, by Jim Spiers, told a story of love and loss via a conversation between two men watching a speed dating event; it was witty and sad, and served to remind me that men are vulnerable and human too – which was a thing I very much needed to be reminded of.