There is huge pressure to portray Muslims positively or as vulnerable victims, says Ayad Akhtar
WHILE tourists in the West End pay as much as £100 to watch live orchestras and huge troupes perform Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musicals, Londoners searching for drama tend to head away from the centre to less fashionable districts where the prices are cheaper and the fare a little edgier and more thought-provoking. They go to venues such as the Tricycle Theatre located on the scruffy Kilburn High Street in north-west London.
The casts may be small and the sets pretty basic but that’s offset by copious supplies of creative ambition and, more often than not, plenty of political messaging. As a tweet proudly copied onto a blackboard in the theatre’s restaurant proclaims: “#InvisibleHand@TricycleTheatre who needs the West End when we have got NW6?”
The plot concerns a Princeton-educated American banker who, having been kidnapped in Pakistan, tries to raise his $10 million ransom by playing the markets on a laptop in his cell.
Over two hundred languages are now spoken in the UK capital but the Tricycle attracts a traditional white crowd. These are impeccably polite, middle-class, middle-aged, liberal Londoners wanting more than the TV has to offer. With a capacity of just 235 crammed together on benches, the theatre is sandwiched between a pizzeria and a closed-down patisserie.
Across the road there’s a rather dingy looking Irish pub named after Sir Colin Campbell, the commander-in-chief of the British army in 1857. He led the suppression of the Indian Mutiny. It is an appropriate setting for the current production: The Invisible Hand by Ayad Akhtar. The play deals with South Asia’s contemporary mutinies not only against US imperialism but also the neo-liberal international order.
The plot concerns a Princeton-educated American banker who, having been kidnapped in Pakistan, tries to raise his $10 million ransom by playing the markets on a laptop in his cell. Confounding the audience’s expectations, the kidnappers want the money not to finance violent jihad but to build schools and hospitals for their community. It’s a clever device allowing Akhtar to put capitalism on trial. “Free market capitalism is a religious ideology,” Akhtar says, “but we think of it as rational, enlightenment thinking.”
Off stage there are drones, assassinations, poverty and corruption. On stage the Pakistani characters enjoy the opportunity to reverse the normal power dynamic as, for once, they exert control over an American. As the banker and his captors explore their very different worlds it becomes clear that the Pakistanis’ main objection to their captive is not that he is a Christian or even an American — but that he is a banker.
“Free market capitalism has all the hallmarks of mythic thinking,” Akhtar says. Adam Smith who in 1870 first analysed market economics, coined the phrase ‘the invisible hand’ to describe the agglomeration of self-interested motives that drive supply and demand. And as Akhtar suggests, if the invisible hand of the market really cannot be seen and if the very idea of an economy also has an intangible quality, then maybe believers in markets are relying not just on rationality but on faith too.
But money cast its spells in the most unlikely places. By dint of a reverse Stockholm syndrome, the captors become so enthralled by the American’s capacity to generate trading profits that by the end they have understood his methods well enough to make $35 million by shorting the Pakistani rupee just before organising for a truckload of explosives to blow up the Pakistan Central Bank governor in Karachi. The power to make money corrupts those who have it.
"I have generally found my work to be ignored by Pakistan and Pakistanis. I think it’s because the portraits I offer are rich and complex and often very flawed,” says Akhtar
Born to Pakistani immigrants in New York, Akhtar is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose last work, Disgraced, was the most produced play in the US in 2015. It’s having another good season this year and is being performed all over the world. There have been, for example, five productions in Australia alone.
There have been various reactions to Akhtar’s success. He raises many issues of concern to Muslims living in the West. But he does not necessarily oblige them by transmitting the messages they would like him to put forward. “There isn’t a mainstream Muslim artist in the US and many people thought I could fit the bill,” Akhtar recently said. Those expectations came in part from US Muslims who hoped he would represent their community either in a positive light or as vulnerable victims. “There is a huge pressure and a huge dissatisfaction that I am not doing that,” he said.
In Pakistan, meanwhile, there have been no performances of his plays. “I have generally found my work to be ignored by Pakistan and Pakistanis. I think it’s because the portraits I offer are rich and complex and often very flawed.” In other words, Akhtar raises difficult questions that some people in Pakistan don’t want asked.
Readers of this paper will be pleased to learn that when, towards the end of The Invisible Hand, one of the actors in the Tricycle production waves a newspaper in the air, he brandishes a copy of Dawn. The stage directions make no such stipulation so I asked Akhtar whether he approved of the use of Dawn in the play. Akhtar said the decision was made by the director, Indhu Rubasingham. But, he added: “I like reading Dawn.”
Originally published in Dawn, May 29th, 2016