Review: VITAMIN D, Soho Theatre

Having to move back with your parents after a failed marriage is raising all types of questions that Larki can’t or doesn’t want to answer. Aunties and fake friends are all up in her business while her life is crumbling around her.

Saher Shah’s playwriting debut is a bittersweet look into individual reinvention and the disappointment that comes with certain social conventions. Directed by Melina Namdar, it stars Shah herself as her main character. It’s part intergenerational comedy and part introspective personal drama, with some spoken word poetry thrown into it. The vision is a clear, fresh take on putting oneself together after an emotional crisis, but the script might still need the TLC that the direction doesn’t provide. It's one of those productions that shows television potential.

Everybody is severely two-dimensional except for Larki, who’s reflective and deep throughout - especially when her poetic interludes come into the game. Though the piece grows into itself as her journey develops, the exchanges can remain quite artificial. Namdar doesn’t exactly help this, staging her performers frontally and having them perform tasks that, while initially reasonable, become redundant and unnaturally repeated by the actors in a way to keep busy while they deliver their lines.

Buried beyond the creaky acting, overacting, and underacting of the start lies a fascinating, provocative reflection on gender roles and tradition in the South Asian experience. Shah seamlessly intercalates her native language in the text, adding musicality to her writing, fearlessly risking the alienation of a slice of her public. The culture of Pakistan isn’t merely represented, it’s celebrated but critiqued too. Shah builds a fine balance in her observations, catching herself when she instinctively gives into the patriarchal structure she grew up in, but also understanding and empathising with her family’s limitations. 

The tension of the expectations and pressures thrust upon her are counteracted by a flair in situational farce. The faked looks of sympathy from the aunties, the cattiness and nosiness of her acquaintances, and the difficult relationship with her mother are mostly played for laughs - and Shah really is a funny playwright. This propensity for humour is jarring against Shah’s sombre verses. That’s when she opens up with profound insights and intimate truths. It’s an intriguing harmony of bittersweet fun.

Anshula Bain and Rosaleen Burton steal the show as, respectively, Larki’s friend and her stereotypically white colleague. There’s no predicting where they’ll take the scene once they’re on stage. The result is consistently hilarious.

All in all, Vitamin D shows a side of South Asian customs that clashes with contemporary Western intersectional feminism. Shah ends her debut on a stirring note with a hard-hitting monologue on the normalisation of women’s suffering. She paints a precise picture, asking herself and the audience where we go from here. That alone is worth the trip.

Vitamin D runs at Soho Theatre until 21 September.

Photo credit: Charles Flint

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