My Name is

In the evening I went to see "My Name is" at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney.   Based on the true story of a half-Pakistani Muslim girl from Scotland who was the subject of a ,Court case to decide where she would live, with her mother in Scotland or her father in Pakistan, it followed the mother's story from the time she was a teenager in a home with an abusive stepfather.and moved out when she was sixteen to live with a local Pakistani boy - she married him in an Islamic ceremony, but was never married under Scottish law.   The boy was very secular when she started going out with him, but once married, he changed and became a typical controlling husband.   She had converted to Islam, and apparently took it all very seriously, becoming something of an expert on religious practices, so that even her in laws thought she was going too far.  

But it was a stormy marriage, and when she eventually lost her faith whilst on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and the fervour that went with it, the relationship was doomed.   Her five children had, however, all been brought up as devout Muslims.

When her husband returned to Pakistan, the twelve year old daughter wanted to live with him - though how much she was influenced by the though of a very comfortable life in Pakistan compared to a life in a small Council flat in Scotland with her mother and stepfather and half siblings is hard to tell.    She slipped away with an elder sister to Pakistan, with her disappearance initially being called abduction, although it later emerged she had wanted to go.   The Courts eventually decided she could stay in Pakistan, though had to be allowed regular contact with her mother.

The play seemed to follow the story quite closely as I remembered it from the news reports, without sensationalising it in any way.  But it did highlight several things very clearly.    The first was the danger of Scottish girls marrying very young into a culture which they don't understand.   Her husband seemed a very ordinary Scottish boy of Pakistani origin - it never occurred to her than he might change if she lived with him and his family.   The second was the cultural differences between them -  he expected her to behave like an uneducated Pakistani girl, rather than an uneducated Scottish girl.   Thirdly, the dangers of marrying without looking very seriously at the implications of changing religion and culture.   The mother mostly saw the marriage as a way of getting away from home and her abusive stepfather - never a good reason to marry.

None of the characters came out as totally sympathetic.   The husband was violent, controlling and unable to realise that he was living in Scotland, not Pakistan.   The wife was from a very rough background, not terribly bright and was also uneducated.   The daughter came out as scheming and manipulative.

But the acting was excellent, and the characters were well cast, making for an excellent play.