DIRTY PAKISTANI LINGERIE to Play The Old Rep

After sold-out runs in 2014-2015, the award-winning show about Muslim-American women that reviewers call a "must-c" production plays at The Old Rep as part of a 15-theatre UK tour.

Cross-cultural sparks fly and preconceptions are hilariously and hauntingly shattered as 6 Pakistani-American women air their Dirty Pakistani Lingerie in the show The Wall Street Journal says "Breaks down stereotypes of Muslim women in America".

Written and performed by Aizzah Fatima and developed and directed by Erica Gould, Dirty Pakistani Lingerie interweaves the stories of six Muslim-American women, aged 6 to 65, all portrayed by Fatima in a virtuosic performance. Drawing from real-life incidents and one-on-one interviews with Pakistani-American women, the show is both infectiously funny and deeply moving. Gould's visually stunning direction incorporates haunting movement and dreamlike projections, as well as razor-sharp physical comedy. In Dirty Pakistani Lingerie, male and female audiences all over the world have found their own experiences reflected in the stories of these Pakistani-American women, which speak not only to a particular cultural moment, but to universal truths, theatricalized through the collaboration between a Muslim (Fatima) and a Jewish (Gould) artist.

Fatima says, "I felt as if I was surrounded by all these amazing women who had remarkable stories to tell - first- and second-generation immigrant women - who just happened to be Pakistani Americans. "There was a human side to this experience of being a Muslim American woman that was completely missing in the media, completely missing in the types of characters we see in film, TV, theater."

According to Gould, Dirty Pakistani Lingerie "addresses the inherent tension between the impulse to assimilate and the desire to maintain one's cultural identity, the tension between what we leave behind and what we take with us; between what we hold onto and what we fear we may have forgotten."

A show that "transcends boundaries of culture, religion, and gender, moving and entertaining audiences with its unique and universal appeal,"(Broadway World West End), Dirty Pakistani Lingerie is a rich, sexy, and infectiously entertaining mosaic of the sublime, the comic, the poetic, and the political.

Dirty Pakistani Lingerie will be performed at The Old Rep as part of their New Work Nights programme alongside works in development from West Midlands theatremakers, including NotNowCollective, Paven Virk and Denise Pitter. This evening of performance, on Wednesday 2 March 7pm, has been produced to showcase excellent work by female writers and theatremakers in the lead up to International Women's Day 2016.

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