“Cuttin' It”, a play exploring female genital mutilation, highlights the value and importance of diverse narratives
By I.M.
“CUTTIN’ IT” opens with Muna, at first glance a typical British 15-year old. She’s late for school: “Not again. I cannot be late again. I’ve taken liberties one too many times, an’ this time they won’t jus ‘low it”. Despite her trying to “Jessica Ennis” it, she’s a fraction too late and the driver refuses to open the doors. She decides, “I’m like that Rosa what’s her name? But forget sittin down, I just wanna get on.” Watching from inside the bus is Iqra, the same age as Muna but seemingly softer, childlike even, clutching her fake Hello Kitty bag. Brought to England five years before as an orphan of the Somalia conflict, she is still trying to work out the foreign world around her. Iqra peers at the city’s inhabitants, “miserable. As if they all agreed to get out of bed in the morning and be angry at the world.”
It is through the eyes of these two teens—navigating friendship, school and pop music—that we are taken to the murky underworld of FGM (female genital mutilation) in Britain. Iqra lives with an “auntie” who offers FGM to families who wish to have the procedure done locally. Muna, like Iqra, is from Somalia but has lived in Britain from the age of three. She finds herself straddling two worlds, brought up British but living with the scars of this different tradition. The drama focuses on the run-up to the seventh birthday of Muna’s sister: the age at which girls often get “cut”, and a fate that Muna is desperate to prevent her sister from enduring.
The play’s two characters represent sides of the FGM debate. Both have suffered its effects—but see it with different eyes. Indeed, Iqra doesn’t see it as suffering at all, she believes that it is necessary in order to be “clean”. The audience naturally aligns itself with the Westernised Muna, but her acerbic wit and astute observations of life endear her further. Iqra at first represents Somalia and something shared, drawing them together, but when Iqra’s conservative cultural views come to the fore, Muna is repulsed. The exchanges between them are powerful. What Iqra sees as “a good Muslim girl” who will make her future husband happy, Muna sees as “just a frightened little girl…lyin there like some messed-up Sleeping Beauty”.
Charlene James, the author of the play, felt urged to write about FGM after seeing a documentary about the practice in Britain, “The Cruel Cut” (2013). At the time, she was working as a teaching assistant to girls the same age as those “cut”, and it deeply affected her. After finding out more about the types of FGM and the extent to which it was practised, she decided to dedicate her work to the 500,000 girls and women in Europe living with its consequences. There have been 6,000 new cases in Britain in the last year. Ms James made it clear to Prospero that she did not agree with the argument put forward in The Economist’s recent piece (“An agonising choice”); she feels that advocating anything other than a total ban on FGM is crippling to the efforts of survivors and campaigners fighting for tougher laws and legislation.
“Cuttin’ It” is currently on tour around Britain but started life at the Young Vic, a theatre that aims to “change the way people look at the world” and perform material outside the traditional canon. Their current season, entitled “Horizon”, is comprised of plays exploring the lives of refugees. This is part of a larger, nationwide movement to make theatre more reflective of the diversity that exists within Britain, and to open up theatre beyond its traditional white, middle class, middle-aged audiences. A “Taking Part” survey conducted from 2005-2014 showed a disquieting situation. There had been no significant change to black and minority ethnic engagement (BAME) with the arts, and the gap between white and BAME participation had actually widened.
The problem—also present in television and musical theatre—is partly an issue of casting, and partly content choice. The ground has started to shift due to vocal proponents for diversity such as Lenny Henry and, more recently, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Since 2011, there has been a 60% increase in BAME workers in the performing arts. This year saw The Royal Shakespeare Company’s first all-black cast for “Hamlet” as well as an excellent array of mainstream theatre: “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at The National explored race in the Jazz age, and the Young Vic's “Queens of Syria”, an adaptation of “The Trojan Women”, was performed by Syrian refugees. There has also been a change in attitude. In the 2016 incarnation of Robert Lepage's “Needles and Opium” at The Barbican, the character of Miles Davis is performed by a physical actor (Wellesley Robertson III). In the original production from the early 1990s, Davis was evoked by a silent shadow. Mr Lepage says that this made the play—where “the two white characters had a voice and were present in flesh and blood”, but Davis wasn't—“uneven”.
Ms James believes that it is vital to see actors on stage that a diverse British audience can relate to. She takes her own parents to see all-black Shakespeare productions because she believes “seeing yourself up there on stage is a way in”: a gateway to understanding that theatre is for everyone. She cautions, however, not to go too far in the other direction by trying to relate to people with simplified issues. Trying to get through to kids with plays about guns and knives, for example, won’t work “because that’s not all people are”. People are complex and divergent, and should not be defined by one issue. It is something that her own play demonstrates so well.
