Laughter aside, Grow up Nana! was an eye-opener
Feroze Kamardeen’s one-man show, Grow up Nana! is back. First staged in November last year, Grow up Nana, written and performed by Feroze is a look at life in Sri Lanka from the perspective of the Sri Lankan Muslim.
Directed by Sashane Perera and Sirraj Abdul Hameed, the show is produced by Ashan Munasinghe and Rikaz Hussain and presented by StageLight&Magic Inc. The repeat show will be staged at the Lionel Wendt on January 12, 13& 14.
For box plan and tickets please visit: stagelightandmagic.com/growupnana
Yomal Senerath-Yapa was at the first production in November:
Feroze Kamardeen’s shows tend to be riotously caustic – like wasabi served with mustard sauce. They grab Colombo by its throat. That is obviously why Colombo likes its Kamardeen – they get to see themselves at their most intimate.
Grow up Nana! promised to be controversial: was Feroze trying to send up his own community? Certainly that was the whiff in the air at the Lionel Wendt...
But it proved to be much more than that. While the Islamic community in all its diversity – Moor, Malay, Borah, or Kalmunai, Gampola, Sammanturai or Batticaloa, were satirised mercilessly, there were brief intervals where some very grave concerns regarding the entire Islamic world were addressed.
The evening began with the caution to non-Muslims- “If you can see the Muslims laugh, you can laugh; if you can’t see them laughing… you can still laugh, men.”
The contrast between Feroze’s signature humour – salacious and schoolboyishly cocky and those sobering moments when his eyes glistened with tears for the situation in Gaza, or the still archaic treatment of women in his community, was quite admirable. It was a well-balanced act drawing on some major aspects of what being Muslim (especially here in Sri Lanka) meant.
But mostly the one man show had the audience in hysterical laughter with some hidden-in-plain-sight home truths. The born satirist he is, Feroze aims at the tenderest spots. Whether it was Muslim weddings (the only occasion
when they are allowed PDW – public display of wealth); or the ubiquitous watalappan; or the ‘aunty network’ who use the term ‘very progressive’ with all the venom in a cobrawhether about a buffet instead of biriyani being served at a wedding, or a girl having high hemlines.
There were those ditties that make Feroze’s shows so addictive. One was on ‘Mummy’s watalappan’. On this iconic dish, there was many a joke. The non-Muslim members of the audience
were assured that they were the only people to receive watalappan as gifts because mummy’s was always the best and sending it to another Muslim household was aggressive. It was always made with jaggery from the store bought ‘under the counter’ and not from a supermarket (the ‘boutique’keeper assuring every hijab-clad housewife in the neighbourhood that it was specially kept only for her family).
The politicians too were somehow (inevitably) drawn in. Chulabhaya
Rajapakse, Chaminda Pusswedilla, Wickrema Nikamsinghe and their bona fide counterparts were lampooned in true Freddy and Pusswedilla style.
With the weddings, hilarity mounted. The Muslims it seems are sadly at a disadvantage in certain ways: they can’t have champagne towers at their weddings (‘what can we do? Stack up the glasses and throw a bucket of Faluda over it?’) or buffets with caviar (it’ll invariably be biriyani) but they have perks like the lavish gifts they get to shower on the bride – down to a sexy negligée bought by Aunty Shermila in London that cools down the groom’s ardour when he hears who it’s really from.
Feroze also tackles the ‘adorable’ racism and ‘placism’ within the Muslim community: There are the Galle Fort Muslims who ‘get on with the Colombo Muslims but are looked down upon by the Kandy Muslims because ‘apparently their ancestors flirted a little too much with the Portuguese’ and so forth going across the map from Oluvil to Trincomalee.
Feroze also played a Siddhi (the Muslim equivalent of a ‘Sheila’) and basically broke down all the taboos on hush-hush topics from Zahira College to marital sex.
With its strong appeal for a better place for the fairer sex (whose major life events are often only to be ‘hatched, matched and dispatched’), in its fresh, wicked yet friendly satire of a community, Grow up Nana! was an eye-opener. Going by the number of hijab-clad heads shaking with mirth, it went down very well with the Siddhis as well as the Nanas!