Our series of extracts from unstaged scripts continues with a play that explores what it means to be Asian and female in modern suburbia
Most women enjoy a special relationship with their beauty salon. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t endure epic bus journeys through interminable Southall traffic towards Neelam and Kuldeep’s magic fingers at the Beauty Room in west London. There, childhood taunts of “Brezhnev eyebrows” and “she-man mush” are waxed and threaded away – even as Sikh guilt about removing sacred hair sprouts up. Curiously, I never did get rid of my “Bearded Lady”/ “Elvis” sideburns.
Both comic and serious, my play Lotus Beauty was inspired by the Beauty Room and the multigenerational women of British Asian suburbia (such as in my home of Southall), who frequent ladies-only salons to pamper and preen themselves, gossip and wax lyrical about their successes, share struggles and find sanctuary and community with other women. There, they make cosmetic changes to their lives. But scratch a polished veneer, and sometimes, a deeper malaise runs beneath. Lotus Beauty seeks to peel away the hidden layers of what it means to be Asian and female in modern Britain, holding up a mirror to see the light and shadows reflecting back.