Hanif Kureishi: ‘I’d like to see a British Muslim Sopranos’
Hanif Kureishi has been reflecting on toxic masculinity. He has heard a lot about it in the past year and it has entered the fiction he has been writing over lockdown – at quite a rate by the sound of it – and sparked stories about predation, sexual misdemeanour and “what’s going on between men and women”.
But he is just as interested in the benign, everyday dynamic between male friends. Most of the men he knows are good people, he says, who get together to talk about music and books, tease each other and chew the cud about life. He misses them now, locked away in his study in west London, although he has grownup sons up the road for company (they live with their mother). There’s the dog, too, which they take to the park together most days.
There is a natural drama in the way friends report their lives to each other over a pint or a coffee, he says, and he has written a play structured around just that: two men sitting down to talk over a drink. It looks at how well they get on and how catastrophically they fall out. It was written before the pandemic and scheduled to run at the Coronet in London before everything closed last year. Now it has opened at Teatro Stabile di Torino, one of Italy’s seven national theatres, after Kureishi’s Italian girlfriend showed it to the play’s translator, Monica Capuani. It stars Filippo
Dini (also the director) and Valerio Binasco.
Its two characters are, like Kureishi’s friends, good men: a picture of middle-class, middle-aged masculinity, even when one of them strays in his marriage and the other tells on him. That decision has a devastating effect on friendship and family life, although the play is sprinkled with its own bathetic comedy. It is called The Spank, for starters, which sounds more like a French farce than a serious drama. And there is a plotline of an ineptly taken “dick pic” that ends up being sent to a teenage daughter instead of a lover.
“It’s a comedy in the Chekhovian sense,” he says, “with a lot of ridiculousness, but I hope it’s also quite moving. My Beautiful Laundrette is a comedy about a gay Pakistani and a gay skinhead who fall in love and run a launderette together. That’s a pretty funny idea too. I like ludicrous ideas but I also like them to be serious.”
At 67, Kureishi is avuncular and warm on Zoom, even if he delivers his dry humour deadpan. He made his name as a screenwriter and novelist with a punkish sensibility in the 1980s, with edgy ideas about sexuality, race and class. But theatre is where he began, at the age of 18, when his father came across a letter he had composed to the Royal Court in London in his bedroom. “He read it and forced me to ring up the Royal Court. When I went there, they gave me a job. I read scripts, worked backstage, at the box office and later I became writer.”
His play Borderline, directed by Max Stafford-Clark, was staged in 1981, and he reckons it was the first drama at the Royal Court about “so-called Asian people”, focusing, as it did, on immigrants living near Heathrow airport. “It was a big break for me. It was one of the few theatres that gave chances to people of colour then. It was a great apprenticeship. I learned a lot from directors. You learn a lot from actors too. You see an actor who can’t say a line and you think, ‘Is it the actor or is there something funny about the line?’”
Now, after decades away from the stage he has returned, although The Spank was written partly out of frustration. He had written a BBC TV