Behzti playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti returns with Behud

Mar 18 2010 By Lorne Jackson

After death threats and protests, the playwright behind Behzti is back with a new play. She speaks to Lorne Jackson.

Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti arrives alone and unarmed for our interview in London.

There is no 6ft 6ins slab of sinister security man – pistol-bulge pulsing through tailored jacket – glowering over her.

She doesn’t roll up in an armoured tank, either. Instead, she saunters over to me – not even a tremor of tension – shakes my hand, asks if I don’t mind if she pops to the loo for a min, then says she knows a rather nice place for lunch.

And no, the restaurant in question is not a highly fortified castle, protected by a crocodile infested moat. Just a small unassuming Polish restaurant in Kilburn.

Should Gurpreet really be this relaxed?

It wasn’t that long ago that a faith-fuelled mob was baying for her blood. She also received death threats in the post. All because of a play she wrote that had its premiere in Birmingham.

The work in question, Behzti, performed to full houses at the Rep. Reviews were encouraging and Gurpreet should have had a smash on her hands.

But it was another kind of smash that led to the play being cancelled.

The smash of theatre windows.

Members of the Sikh community took exception to charged incidents in the play, which is set inside a Sikh temple.

They marched on the Rep, and violent scuffles were barely contained by the authorities.

Gurpreet – herself a Sikh, who still goes to temple – then received the threats to her life, and was advised by the police to leave Birmingham, where she had been staying while her play was performed.

The London-based author was moved to a safe house with a security camera outside her door, and had police officers assigned to protect her.

After a period, the communal snarl slumbered into silence.

However, there is a possibility that righteous fury could rise again, because Gurpreet has written a new play – to be performed in the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, from the end of this month – about her Behzti experience.

Behud (a Punjabi word meaning without limit) is about a playwright attempting to make sense of the past by visiting the darkest corners of her imagination. It is set amidst the conflicting worlds represented by the theatre establishment, politicians and protesters.

But why did Gurpreet return to these days of rage and riot? Wouldn’t it have been best to let sleeping mobs lie?

“I just had to go back and look at that time in my life, again,” she says. “It felt like such a monumental, extraordinary experience in my existence, that I had to process it as a writer.

“It would have been disingenuous to myself not to have written about that event.”

The reaction to Behzti must have been shocking for a young woman who spends so much of her time in solitude, hidden away with her characters and plots.

What happened outside the Rep in December 2004 was one plot she couldn’t control.

She admits to having some inkling that this particular work would be controversial, as part of the performance was set in a Gurdwara (Sikh temple) and the play, near its end, escalates towards high levels of violence.

“I knew that it would be a provocative piece, but I didn’t expect that level of reaction,” she says. “Writing it was my way of expressing myself, and I stick by everything that I wrote.

“I understood why the Rep decided to cancel it, but I was still so angry. It just seemed to me so wrong. One of the themes of the play was how women are robbed of their voice. I saw an interview on TV with Salman Rushdie, and he was talking about what had happened to me. He said it was ironic that the woman who wrote a play about women losing their voice also lost hers.”

It’s understandable that Gurpreet wanted to defend her work. But didn’t she have any regrets after the death threats? Couldn’t she have made her point in a more palatable way?

“No regrets,” she says. “And strangely enough, it really wasn’t as scary as you might imagine.

“When something really extreme like that happens, there just isn’t much time to feel anything. Even fear.