British theatre excels in presenting social issues: at its best, it shines a bright light on the controversial subjects that people are thinking, and talking, about. Emteaz Hussain’s excellent new play, which opens at the Royal Court, is based on the appalling crimes, which took place from the 1990s to the 2010s, which involved hundreds of young girls being sexually exploited in northern towns by gangs of predatory men.Broadly based on the Rotherham child sexual abuse scandal, which affected some 1,400 girls who were groomed by gangs of mainly Asian men, Expendable has little to say about the Read more ...

On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored across by a notched brown line. It represents the horizon of one of the flat landscapes through which the author travels.Masud is, amongst other things, a theorist of the aphorism, and it is thus striking that the horizons on which she sets her sights throughout the chapters of this book are etymologically linked to this short-form wisdom: the Greek “apo”, which means “away from”, combines with “horizein”, meaning “to bound”.Though Masud never explicitly draws on this connection of wisdom- Read more ...

Partially banned in Pakistan, Saim Sadiq’s debut uses a young man’s affair with a trans woman to reveal the sadness and brutality of the nation’s patriarchal norms. It’s also a deeply sympathetic character study written from under the country’s skin, which Sadiq calls “a heartbroken love letter to my homeland”.Haider (Ali Junejo) is casually bullied by older brother Saleem (Sohail Saheer) and ageing patriarch Rana (Salmaan Peerzada) for his lack of machismo. It’s his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) who seizes a knife from him to slash a goat’s throat, its blood pooling darkly on courtyard tiles, Read more ...

Britain is a divided nation, but one of the divisions that we don’t hear that much about is that between Pakistani gay men. Written by Waleed Akhtar (who also stars in this impressively heartfelt two-hander), The P Word is about the differences in life experiences between one asylum seeker and one Londoner, and comes to the Bush Theatre in a production which has been supported by Micro Rainbow, the first safe house in the UK for LGBTQ asylum seekers and refugees. So what’s it all about?Set in contemporary London, the 85-minute play begins with two parallel life stories: one is that of 31-year Read more ...

The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in Trump's devastatingly hardline immigration policy, immigrants, both first- and second-generation, face a spectrum of prejudice, violence and categorisation in the increasingly divided "land of the free". In the wide-ranging collection The Good Immigrant USA, editors Chimene Suleyman and Nikesh Shukla make it their aim to "finally let immigrants be in charge of their own narrative" as writers and artists from Teju Cole to Jenny Zhang and Chiogizie Obioma to Dani Fernandez Read more ...

When Mogul Mowgli was first announced, it was fair to expect something of a realist biopic. After all, you had documentary director Bassam Tariq and actor/musician extraordinaire Riz Ahmed helming a film about a British-Pakistani rapper. Even the title is partially taken from one of Ahmed’s songs (“Half Moghul Half Mowgli” by Swet Shop Boys). And then we meet Tuba Tek Singh (pictured above right), a beflowered hallucination of cultural heritage and trauma. This ain’t no realist biopic; it’s something so much more.Ahmed plays Zed, on the precipice of success after years of grinding. We find Read more ...

After Bassam Tariq's feature debut These Birds Walk was released at SXSW 2013, things seemed to slow down. The documentary about a runaway boy in Pakistan garnered strong reviews, but soon Tariq was working in a New York butchers pondering his career. However, the film did catch the eye of someone: Hollywood star Riz Ahmed. The two began talking, and realised they shared the same interests in heritage and generational relationships. And thus, Mogul Mowgli was born.In the film, Ahmed plays Zed, a rapper on the brink of international success. During a flying visit to his family home in Read more ...

This week’s gem from the Hampstead’s vaults is Howard Brenton’s political drama from 2013, telling the extraordinary, stranger-than-fiction story of Cyril Radcliffe and his 1947 mission: to arrange the Partition of India in just five weeks. A tale of battling ideologies, gross colonial arrogance and disregard, and the unlikely significance of an extramarital affair, this history lesson makes for surprisingly gripping theatre – and, to Brenton’s great credit, he manages a lucid account of this complex, seismic undertaking in less than two hours.Lawyer-turned-bureaucrat Cyril Radcliffe (Tom Read more ...

Jamil Dehlavi is a filmmaker whose work straddles two worlds. His native Pakistan is certainly the key element in the two early films on this BFI dual-format release – it follows on from the director’s August South Bank retrospective, the first there for a director from that country – but it is as if, for a variety of reasons, he always had a foot in a cinematic context that went beyond it.His film education and training came in New York, and the spirit of experimental cinema of the time infuses his 1975 Towers of Silence, though its visual elements are anchored in Karachi’s shoreline and Read more ...

The Big Sick is an enchanting film from the Judd Apatow comedy production line. Don’t be put off by the terrible title. There are two forms of sickness on display in the story of Kumail Nanjiani, a Pakistani American who plays himself in his own autobiographical romantic comedy.The overt sickness is the one which afflicts Emily (Zoe Kazan). She and Kumail, a stand-up comedian/Uber driver, start dating after she heckles him at a gig. She spends half the movie in a coma, flirting with death, while Kumail loiters around the hospital, willing her to recover even though they have in fact broken up Read more ...

The Partition of India is vast and unexplored terrain in modern cinema. It triggered the migration of 14 million people: Muslims moved from an India reduced in size overnight to the new homeland of Pakistan, and non-Muslims made the opposite journey. It was what we’ve seen in Syria but multiplied by sheer volume of numbers, and squeezed into a much smaller timeframe. The border squiggled on the map was arbitrary and conjured up in haste. So a film about this seismic subcontinental shift is long overdue. It has fallen to Gurinder Chadha, a British filmmaker of Indian origin brought up in Kenya Read more ...

Gurinder Chadha is still best-known for directing a low-budget comedy set in Hounslow about two girls who just want to play football. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) introduced Keira Knightley and in 2015 became a stage musical that lured Asian audiences to the West End. While she also explored British Asian culture in Bride and Prejudice (2004) and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (2010), in her new film she abandons light comedy to address the biggest and most decisive moment in Britain’s relationship with India.Viceroy’s House is set in 1947 at the moment Lord Mountbatten arrived in Delhi to oversee Read more ...