Santi & Naz is a drama set in the Punjab in 1947 that uses an ancient and thrilling storyline about domestic violence. The main characters are a pair of young lesbians who plot to kill Naz’s bridegroom, Nadim, on the eve of the wedding. They discuss stabbing or poisoning him and eventually they decide to drown him in the village lake.
This is a strange play. It wants to teach us about Indian society in the 1940s while assuming we’re experts
There are many motives for this murder. Santi and Naz hate men. They detest the custom of marriage which forces women to endure painful sexual couplings. And Santi fears that Naz will be unsafe in her marital home because ‘Muslim husbands beat their wives’. Nadim has already been discourteous to Naz by calling her a ‘witch’ and using other unkind remarks, in Urdu, which are left untranslated. For these crimes, the girls sentence Nadim to death.
However, this fascinating set-up arrives in the final moments of the play and not at the start, where it belongs. And the girls quickly talk themselves out of committing murder and downgrade their attack to a harmless prank. They plan to shove Nadim into the lake, steal his clothes and force him to walk home naked. But even this jape doesn’t materialise because independence day arrives on 14 August, 1947, and the entire country is engulfed by sectarian violence.
Nadim’s marriage to Naz is forgotten as the two girls contemplate the horrific aftermath of partition. This is a very strange play. It wants to teach us about Indian society in the 1940s while simultaeously assuming that we’re experts on the subject already. The girls spend a lot of time performing satirical sketch routines. Santi mocks Gandhi’s strangulated speech tones and Naz impersonates the swaggering grandiloquence of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. These skits would doubtless amuse anyone who had seen either statesman speaking in public. But few of us have had that honour. They both died in 1948. To keep abreast of current affairs, the girls listen to news reports on the radio, but they don’t tell us which issues are being discussed and who is speaking.
The play is full of riddles and mysteries. It’s not clear if Santi is a Sikh or not. The girls could be any age between about 13 and 20. They act like a married lesbian couple even though they restrict their intimacies to playful spooning and the odd peck on the lips. ‘I don’t care what people say,’ announces Santi as they kiss for the first time. What people? No one in the village gives a hoot about their fling. The romance is dead safe and therefore dramatically inert.
And it’s noticeable that the world of the Punjab in 1947 is very similar to present day London. ‘This will blow your mind,’ says Santi as she shares the latest lesbian fiction with Naz. Santi’s brother offers to teach her cricket but she laughs in his face. ‘I totally didn’t need to learn cricket. I hit more sixes than any of them,’ she says, sounding like a sports scholar at UCL. Both girls speak English in the same creamily modulated tones as Kemi Badenoch. The show doesn’t really work as a piece of historical fiction. Perhaps it’s just a sixth form drama project. If so, it deserves top marks for effort.
Canned Goods is a prison drama about a farm-hand, Honiok, who doesn’t know why he’s in jail. He puts this question to the prison governor, Major Naujocks, who refuses to answer. This set up is repeated twice. Honiok is joined by two more prisoners who don’t know why they’re in jail, either. And the Major employs a pair of subordinate officers who decline to share any information. The questions and answers go around in circles. To kill time, the prisoners chunter about their childhoods or they doze on their mattresses.
Weeks slip past. The lack of action is enlivened by a Nazi element. Honiok puts on an armband and does impersonations of Hitler. The Major struts around in leather jackboots, teasing the prisoners, and occasionally throwing back his head and guffawing at nothing in particular. Only Nazis running prison camps laugh like this. One senses that the jackboots and the swastikas have been added by the playwright to help sell tickets. Then the scene changes. Three dead bodies appear and the Major enters with a pistol. He makes a gloating speech over each corpse and fires a bullet into its skull. Very weird. Why shoot a dead body?
But it isn’t over yet. The Major breaks the fourth wall and asks the audience what they think of the show. Then the house lights come up. The Major starts screaming crazily and demanding that all Jewish ticket-holders identify themselves. Doubtless a very uncomfortable experience for Jews. This isn’t a play about malignity. It’s just malign.
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