There’s a telling moment in Zia Ahmed’s
I Wanna Be Yours, where poet Haseeb (Ragevan Vasan) goes on a playwrighting course aimed at encouraging more minority voices, and finds that every attempt to write about the everyday, casual racism he experiences as a Muslim is rejected, and he’s told instead to focus on bigger issues of global politics and terrorism. In that context his bittersweet romantic comedy about an interracial relationship feels like a deliberate pushback against that mindset about what people want to see in the theatre, avoiding the grand tragedies and sticking instead to the way the little daily discriminations build up to become exhausting (there
is a reference to a terrorist attack on a mosque, but mainly in the context of Haseeb having to miss a dinner date so he can console his mother.) The main focus is on his relationship with Ella (Emily Stott,) an actress he meets when she leads another workshop aimed at making poets more confident reading their own work in public.
