Stage-to-screen review: My Beautiful Laundrette

Leicester's Curve Theatre continues to dip into its archive recordings to provide online content and fundraise during lockdown; latest is last year's My Beautiful Laundrette, adapted by Hanif Kureishi from his own screenplay. It's something of a rollercoaster ride during the early eighties for an extended Pakistani-British family, rising above the general wave of unemployment by building a small business empire (albeit one that isn't quite as legal and respectable as it initially appears) while at the same time being regularly reminded that they're still viewed by many as an underclass. It's seen through the eyes of Omar (Omar Malik) and his complicated relationship with old schoold friend Johnny (Jonny Fines, who seems pretty spot-on casting for a play about laundry, considering he's always struck me as looking literally very clean, but metaphorically a bit dirty.)

Stage-to-screen review:Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual

More online theatre is being announced all the time to fill in the gap left by the buildings being shut, with the majority of what's coming up being shows I've already seen in person and reviewed. But that mainly applies to London and Stratford-upon-Avon, and the regional theatres I don't generally get to have been releasing material as well. In return for a donation, Leicester Curve are offering a recording of their 2018 show Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual for a week - this is an archive recording that was never intended for public release, but I guess even those have moved on in quality over the years, and instead of a static shot this is a perfectly watchable recording done with multiple moving cameras. Riaz Khan's original book was a response to the resurgence of racism on the football terraces in the noughties, through the lens of him finding an identity in the eighties in the unlikely family of the much-derided gangs of violent football hooligans known as casuals.