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Reviewed by:
  • Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain
  • Terry Stoller
Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. By Gabriele Griffin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. x + 291. $65.00 cloth.

Generational conflicts, fragmentation of families, arranged marriages, spousal abuse, the effects of racism: these are the themes that Gabriele Griffin discusses in her book, Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain. Griffin is interested in how plays written by black and Asian women reflect the concerns of first- and second-generation migrants to Britain. Inspired by Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, by Avtar Brah, Griffin explores through the plays how uprooted people cope with their adjustment to life in Britain, at times rejecting, at other times embracing, the legacy of their land of origin. She pays special attention to their feelings of displacement and estrangement, to an "in-between" state, or entre-deux, as described by Hélène Cixous. The playwrights, Griffin writes, view themselves not as outsiders but as very much a part of contemporary British theatre. And while she recognizes that not all the plays by black and Asian women deal with issues of diaspora, Griffin has chosen to examine the ones that do.

The book offers a variety of plays from both well-known and lesser-known playwrights. Among the works by high-profile writers, Griffin includes a screenplay by Meera Syal, who also wrote the original libretto of Bombay Dreams; a play by Tanika Gupta, who has written for popular British television shows and has been a writer-in-residence at the Royal National Theatre; and a number of plays by Winsome Pinnock, whose work has been performed at the Royal Court and the Tricycle Theatre. Among the works by lesser-known writers are a bilingual play created as a result of a workshop with a Bengali women's drama group in Leeds, and an autobiographical piece about an unwed teenage mother, which was performed at the Polytechnic of the South Bank in London, where the writer was a student. The venues that promote and produce works by black and Asian playwrights include the Theatre Royal Stratford East, the Soho Theatre, and the Oval House Theatre in London, the Birmingham Rep, the Leicester Haymarket, and the Liverpool Playhouse. An American reader who may not have had the opportunity to see or read these plays will appreciate Griffin's extensive bibliography. A number of the plays have been published in Methuen's marvelous multivolume series, Plays by Women.

The book's main focus is on plot and character analysis, though some consideration is given to stage directions and production history and values. In a chapter titled "Diasporic Subjects," Griffin looks at plays that particularly address the problems of adapting to the new country and losing ties to community, home, and family. Winsome Pinnock's Leave Taking revolves around the physical and psychological toll that migration takes on a group of people from the West Indies. A central figure in this piece is the obeah, or healing woman, who provides emotional and spiritual support along with her healing practices. Leave Taking, Griffin writes, suggests that a break with one's past can lead to breakdown and a type of illness that cannot [End Page 731] be healed by British medicine, but can only be reached through the rituals of the old country. Trish Cooke's Running Dream centers on the impact of migration on three generations of a family. A mother and father relocate to Britain and leave their daughters with the grandmother in Dominica; in England, the father deserts the mother, who gives birth to another daughter. The migrants deal with social isolation, while those who were left behind suffer the pain of abandonment. This play is enriched by incantation in Dominican patois, choral passages, and song. Griffin explores the play's themes and non-naturalistic devices that underscore the diasporic experience as loss.

The other chapters take up culture clashes and issues of identity, as well as the quest for empowerment through spirituality, a return visit to the land of origin, and sexual exploration. Maya Chowdhry's poetic work Monsoon offers an avenue to self-discovery through an intimate female...

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