Asian beauty amidst lurking beasts

Daniel Nelson

Playwright Satinder Chohan’s play set in a Southall salon starts as beauty and business banter and and careens into drama and emotional turmoil.

Lotus Beauty is a mouthy —  or as Chohan describes it, conversational —  piece, but it’s not restrained drawing room dialogue: it’s no-holds-barred (well, a few), indiscreet, secrets-busting, woman-to-woman, generation-to-generation talk.

Naturally, body hair (of enormous symbolic importance in Sikhism), teenage sex, ageing and marriage feature, but so do racism, undocumented workers, misogyny and money.

Though weighty, the issues are mostly cursorily dealt with. The overall effect is of Asian soap with occasional glimpses of deep feelings, such as mother-in-law Big Dhadhi’s reliving of the trauma of her British immigration virginity check. The overall result is that the whole is lesser than the parts, but the parts are entertaining.

The five characters (Reita, the driven owner; Pinky, her hormone-swirling daughter; the unashamedly bearded Big Dhadhi; salon staffer and ondocumented worker Tanwant; and Kamal, a young client struggling with domestic violence) represent different ages, personalities and situations, more than enough to provide a rich set of interacting plot twists, which cascade into an emotional pile-up after the interval.

Men are absent from the salon world but exert a powerful influence on these five women’s lives — and their influence is mostly malign and sometimes violent.

Chohan draws on her own life as a young Southallwali. In an interview for the free programme, she says her grandparents moved to west London’s Southall  area more than 60 years ago, and the inspiration for the salon is the real-life Beauty Room, “my regular place of minor eyebrow threading and upper lip waxing for over two decades!” She even worked there briefly as an occasional receptionist, gathering material .

It is striking that the programme’s timeline for South Asian women in the UK consists largely of entries about racism, discrimination, labour struggles, domestic abuse, suicides and forced marriage. She writes elsewhere that 80 out of 240 rail suicides in one year in Britain occurred on track running through Southall, Slough and other Asian areas. That, too, weaves its way into the play.

She counterbalances the catalogue of women’s struggles with the flawed humanity,  humour, resilience and sincerity of the characters — “these are the women who have overcome struggles as women and immigrants in Britain, lifting themselves up and others too.”

* Lotus Beauty, £5-£20,  is at the Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, NW3,  until 18 June. Info: 7722 9301 https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2022/lotus-beauty/