Dirty Paki Lingerie

There are not many shows this critic would be embarrassed asking a box-office teller for tickets to: Chicks with Dicks, maybe; Les Miserables, probably; any Jennifer Anniston rom-com, definitely.

If I found collecting my review tickets for Dirty Paki Lingerie —a name that wouldn’t look out of place on a flyer for a British National Party demo—a little disconcerting (which I did), writer and performer Aizzah Fatima’s thoughtful one-woman show about Pakistani women’s identity was worth the mortification.

Dirty Paki Lingerie sets out to explore—and explode—cultural myths and stereotypes about Pakistani women, revealing how culture and tradition make different, often conflicting, claims on their lives.

Over the course of a well-paced hour Fatima presents the lives of seven Pakistani women, from a six year-old girl whose father has been arrested on trumped up terrorism charges to a mother in her 50s who decides to leave her unloving Pakistani husband. We meet Mrs Khan as she combs the matrimonial ads in an Urdu newspaper for a potential suitor for her daughter. Meanwhile, Raheela, a 35 year-old professional woman on a business trip, makes eyes with an attractive Pakistani man in the airport. Without meeting they begin chatting online during the flight; she thinks she has found someone special, until he suggests they meet in the First Class bathroom. Raheela is, in his eyes, too intelligent and too old to be any more than a passing fling.

Dirty Paki Lingerie dispels taboos without dealing in ciphers and strawmen itself. Fatima has drawn each character artfully and humanely – the result is a vital, engaging piece of theatre.