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.

Tom is concerned that Ahad get the funeral he would have wanted, but even though it's never explicitly stated that they were a couple Ayesha makes the snap decision to refuse his custom.

This comes back to bite the couple a few weeks later when they find themselves in the middle of a high-profile discrimination lawsuit. Zeyd wants Ayesha to ask for help from her childhood friend Janey (Jessica Clark,) now a successful barrister in London, but she doesn't want to tell him the reasons that's a bad idea: Firstly, as a lesbian human rights lawyer, Janey isn't going to be on their side anyway, and secondly the reason Ayesha let herself drift apart from her friend was that she was always secretly in love with her herself.

Where Qureshi's play is most impressive is in its dealing with the tricky issue of where one person's right to religious freedom ends and someone else's right to freedom of sexuality begins, and it does this largely by making the religious objections a red herring: The central couple are generally pretty liberal, and in fact as Zeyd is at first unaware of his wife's conflict, he assumes without question that she turned Tom away not because of any prejudice of her own, but because it would cost them business from the more hardcore local community. Thiara brings enough nuance to the role to make sense of his character's abrupt change of heart - starting as someone who buys Ayesha a vibrator (it's silicone, so it's Halal) to try and kickstart their sex life, and makes sure Ahad gets a proper Muslim funeral even if it's not with them, by the second half of the play he's being furiously homophobic, a change brought on by the lawsuit as well as his growing suspicion that his own wife is more of a fish person than a meat person.

Where the play struggles a bit more is in juggling the amount of themes it covers with a cast of only four - with the reaction of the wider, more conservative Muslim community being such a major concern, the fact that we don't get to see a representative of that community to tell their side of the story becomes increasingly frustrating. And considering Ayesha's own sexuality is heavily alluded to in the show's publicity so most people will have come into the show suspecting it, Qureshi takes a long time to have her protagonist start to confront it. I also wished that, when she finally did, Ayesha had found her own words to describe how she squares her religion with her sexuality, rather than mirroring the late Ahad's words quite so closely.

But Hannah Hauer-King's production is an intense one that brings out the best sides of the play, while I loved the details in Amy Jane Cook's split traverse set that reinforce the fact that while Ayesha and Zeyd do their job diligently, it's purely out of a sense of duty to Ayesha's late mother from whom they inherited the funeral home: Janey comments that the place hasn't changed in 11 years, and indeed the public area with its tacky tissue holder, saucers of custard creams and clutter is an old lady's idea of a comforting space rather than something a young couple enthusiastic about making their business a success would design. It's sometimes tripped up by wanting to cover too much with too few resources, but The Funeral Director is generally up there with the more successful Papatango winners.

The Funeral Director by Iman Qureshi is booking until the 24th of November at Southwark Playhouse's Little Theatre; touring to Edinburgh, Nottingham, Oxford and Manchester in 2019.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: The Other Richard, Tristram Kenton.