Curl Girl Productions is a West Midlands-based theatre company, led by artistic director Kiren Jogi, which focusses on South East Asian culture. The Valley of Queens is a piece of verbatim theatre performed by a cast of five women. It was created out of a project funded by Creative Black Country in which women aged fifty and over of South East Asian heritage met every week to share their experiences of migration and participate in art projects.
The title comes from a gorge on the Nile in Egypt where the royal wives of the pharaohs were buried, but it is also a reference to Sandwell Valley, to the west of Birmingham, where the women live.
The set is a recreation of the community centre where the women met. At the back, there is a patchwork quilt with “Together We Stand. Valley Of Queens” embroidered on it, a noticeboard and a refreshments table. A long trestle table is stage-centre, preset with balls of wool and knitting needles. The cast of five women enters, four of Indian heritage and one from Jamaica, and for the next hour, they knit, dance and tell each other about their lives.
For a little over an hour, we hear stories of working-class life which will be familiar to anyone who grew up in the sixties: shared beds, outside toilets, weekly visits to the local baths, daily deliveries by the milkman and coal delivered every month into an outside coal cellar. Other stories are specific to the expat Indian community: the difficulty in getting on and off a bus in a sari, arranged marriages and learning about the English way of life from the BBC’s weekly Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye (Make Yourself at Home) programme. The English diet is also an obstacle course with a mixture of horrors, like a full English breakfast complete with bacon and sausages, and unexpected childhood delights such as fried bread and butter and custard tarts.
Other shared memories are specific to the Black Country, such as the Beacon Cinema in Smethwick and being the first Indian lady to work at the Kipling factory.
For the most part, this is the sum of the piece: affectionate memories of a vanished world shared with friends, delivered mostly in English with occasional lines in Panjabi and often accompanied by murmurs of recognition from the audience.
At times, the play hints at something darker and potentially more dramatic. One of the women, Balbir (Balbir Dhesi-Rallmill), tells of how her family escaped from Kenya to India. We hear a short clip of a speech by Jomo Kenyatta which gives context to the flight of the Asian community from parts of Africa following the independence of countries such as Kenya and Uganda, and it reminds us that there is a reason why these women were displaced. At one point, the cast comes out into the audience chanting “Education not deportation”, so there is a political sensibility here, but while we learn why Balbir left Kenya, we don’t learn why she and her friends left India. Maybe these are things the women didn’t want to talk about, which is fair enough, but as Britain comes to terms with its colonial past, it left me wanting to know more.
Towards the end, Manjinder (Kiren Jogi) delivers a powerful and emotional monologue about sustaining a childhood injury and her subsequent marriage. A theme of domestic abuse runs through the piece—several of the women complain of being treated as unpaid servants once they left their childhood home and moved in with their in-laws—but this is the only story which is delivered at such length and in such depth.
The Jamaican woman, Joyce (Nataylia Roni), also has her own story, but she tends to serve as a proxy audience for the other women to explain the specifically India references to.
The director, Neetu Singh, keeps the action to a minimum in order to foreground the women’s stories, and Ravneet Kaur’s choreography has the unforced, spontaneous look of women dancing for themselves and each other rather than for a theatre audience.
This is a warm and affectionate piece of theatre which captures the intimacy and solidarity of a generation of women who were marginalised by the intersection of their class, ethnicity and gender and the restrictions placed on them by their education, their work prospects and family pressure.
Reviewer: Andrew Cowie