Theatre review: Guards at the Taj

As well as being one of the most famous man-made landmarks on Earth, Taj Mahal in Agra, India is known as something of a romantic symbol of love, built as it was by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a tribute to his favourite wife after her death. But there's also an enduring legend that he decreed no other structure should ever match its beauty, and to ensure this had the hands cut off the 20,000 workers who built the monument so they could never work on anything else. Rajiv Joseph's 2015 play Guards at the Taj deals with this contrast of profound beauty and extreme cruelty that the Taj represents, and Adam Karim revives it at the Orange Tree as this year's JMK Award winning director. During the 16 years of construction, the monument was hidden from public view behind a wall, and the play opens a few hours before dawn comes and the Taj is finally revealed.

Theatre review: Approaching Empty

Ishy Din’s Approaching Empty takes place in 2013, specifically between the announcement of Margaret Thatcher’s death and her state funeral. It’s an on-the-nose framing for the story of two lifelong friends whose lives were largely defined by the dead sociopath’s policies: Mansha and Raf moved from Pakistan to Middlesbrough in the 1970s to work in a steelworks specialising in bridge-building, but in the ’80s Thatcher’s policies saw the factories close and the onus put on the workers to make their own way. Raf (Nicholas Khan) largely views this as a success, as he used his redundancy package to start a minicab business; it’s managed day-to-day by Mansha (Kammy Darweish,) who used his own redundancy to pay off his mortgage, but then spent the next thirty years stuck in a rut professionally. So when out of nowhere Raf expresses an interest in selling the business to a larger cab firm, Mansha finally sees an opportunity to be his own boss.

Theatre review: The Funeral Director

I try to catch the Papatango playwrighting award winner every year, and this year's offering doesn't lack for ambition in its subject matter: Iman Qureshi's The Funeral Director takes on the line where different marginalised groups' human rights clash. Ayesha (Aryana Ramkhalawon) and her husband Zeyd (Maanuv Thiara) run a funeral home specialising in Muslim funerals in "a small divided town in the Midlands." Married for five years they seem to be ticking along with their lives well enough but clearly aren't actually happy - Zeyd is just about comfortable enough to confront the fact that his wife is completely uninterested in sex, but she always dodges the conversation. An unexpected crisis comes to their lives in the form of Tom (Tom Morley,) who comes into the funeral parlour in a state of shock after his Muslim boyfriend dies of an overdose that may or may not have been suicide.