Snookered: Showing @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Thu 16 – Sat 18 Feb
It’s easy to get wrapped up in cultural and political differences today; tensions between East and West grow ever more charged, our domestic economy constantly seems at odds with international processes and press coverage often warps entire storylines on a whim. But there are some social universals which remain: fears and anxieties about growing up, grieving for the loss of friends and family, and how to fit into modern society as a consumer or employee.
Ishy Din’s play Snookered reminds us of these dimmed facts as he tells of four British Muslims who meet up for a drink and a game of snooker on the sixth anniversary of their friend’s death. As secrets are revealed about themselves and their friend, Din penetrates through the guilt and tension which can slide between relationships with devastating effect.
‘I was just a regular guy. I still am a regular guy’, says Din. ‘I was working as a cabbie, got 3 kids, mortgage, bills to pay and I was just plodding along’. His life as a playwright started within a week of buying a computer for his daughters, as he thought they’d need one for school: ‘within a week of buying one I heard this advert on 5 live saying we’re looking for ideas for a short script based on a sporting theme, so I wrote this piece about two Pakistani men who go to watch Middlesbrough for the first time’. After the play was shortlisted and subsequently produced, it inspired Din to continue writing.
After a while, Din explains that he ‘ended up on the Tamasha writers’ course where Snookered was conceived. At the end of the course I had a rough idea about four friends getting drunk and playing pool’. By grounding it in the lives of four everyman-type blokes, Din says that his characters ‘can speak honestly, there’s no constraints like Radio or TV – they can just say what they want in the way they want to say it’. It provides space for Din to explore the relationship between the characters: ‘male friendship is quite particular, it’s difficult to find friends that you’re comfortable talking about how you feel with. There’s a lot of bravado’. In the play, ‘with all the angst that’s building up, it’s about finding a release’.
By telling the lives of British Muslims, there is always the hanging political question of how this piece comments on our sensitivity towards differing cultural values. Din states that ‘there’s a certain perception of who the “other” community is. But this perception also exists within the Asian community about who white people are; I’ve spoken to over 160,000 people and we have so much more in common’. In reality, ‘people’s concerns are quite similar: paying your mortgage, bringing your kids up, the regular worries’. It’s a praiseworthy reorientation of how we look at the social universals which unify, and don’t divide, mankind.
Quite simply, Din says ‘first and foremost it’s a play about young men, and in this case, these guys happen to be Asian. The issues might be different but they’d still be there; it would revolve around university and careers, issues that all young men have’. Din’s play gives us the chance to stare into the emotional storylines and regular characters professional theatre can lack; coming from experiences taken throughout Din’s life, it’s an uncomplicated and humble reflection of our own worries and triumphs.
Off the back of ‘Snookered’, Din is now the playwright in residence at the Manchester Royal Exchange. He is also developing a radio play and is starting a project working with young people about identity in the Tees Valley. Further to this, he is beginning work on a trilogy of plays about Asian men.