Behzti playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti returns with Behud

Mar 18 2010 By Lorne Jackson

“Of course it was full on for a while, with the CCTV outside the flat. How I’d describe what I went through, is that it was a bit like when somebody close to you dies. You just have to get on with it. You know how you have to turn up at the funeral and go into that mourning mode?

“Well, that’s what I did, in a manner of speaking.

“When it really hit me like a tonne of bricks was after the event – the day after the funeral.

“For me, that was when I finally went back to my flat and started to get some idea how big this situation really was. How much trouble I was in.

“So there were moments that were painful and difficult, but they tended to come later. There were also moments that were very funny.”

Funny? It’s hard to imagine what humour could have been extracted from the situation.

When Salman Rushdie faced a similar threat, he didn’t turn his experiences into an award winning sitcom starring David Jason.

No ‘Only Fools And Fatwas’ from the author of The Satanic Verses.

Instead, Rushdie sweated out his predicament in misery and isolation.

But Gurpreet is resolutely upbeat. She is no brooder, and never seems to indulge in the kind of fitful paranoia you may imagine would overtake her.

I’d even go so far as to say she was positively bubbly when we met. Much happier talking about her favourite 1970s movies (The Godfather, The Conversation) than debating the limitations of free speech in a democratic society.

But hang around long enough, and there are flickers of concern that even she can’t briskly bubble away.

Gurpreet does not want her photograph published in the Post – understandably.

She is also wary of talking about her family, not wanting to drag them into the orbit of offence that surrounds her. All she will say is that the elder generation stand by her artistic decisions, and are proud of her.

Nothing funny about that.

Yet she repeatedly insists that there were comedy crack-ups during her time in hiding.

“In any extreme human experience, there is both darkness and light,” she says. “The police officers looking after me were quite funny. The kind of things they came out with! For instance, they were tremendously excited because they had never been involved in a faith-rage scenario before. I was their first one.

“Another comic moment came after I issued a statement that came out in the Guardian. One of the guys I was in regular contact with said to me, ‘I’ve done something today that I’ve never done before in my life. You made me buy the Guardian!’

“My way of coping with dark things is to examine them humorously, so it wasn’t all bleak for me.”

Gurpreet says Behud also has its funny moments, and she hopes the audience will enjoy a giggle at her predicament.

Although the play is heavily autobiographical, it isn’t boringly factual.

The action takes place in the playwright’s mind, allowing for a mixture of gritty goings-on and surreal moments.

“It’s really hard to describe,” says Gurpreet. “The best way to describe this new play is to say that it’s a bit like Six Characters In Search Of An Author or the American independent movie, Adaptation.”

Gurpreet has come a long way in a short time. After leaving Bristol University (very snobbish) she worked in a woman’s hostel (not snobbish, of course).

Then she stumbled into the theatrical profession when she was spotted in a club.

“A woman came up to me and said I was what she was looking for, and would I like to be in her play? She must have liked my dancing.”

Gurpreet took to performance, then sent off an idea for a play to the Birmingham Rep.

The Rep emitted positive noises and it became her first performed play, Behsharam.

Since then she has written more plays and also works in film and TV. She was a scriptwriter on EastEnders for a few years, though her strangest assignment was writing the ‘Bible’ for Birmingham-based soap, Crossroads.

This meant devising all the characters and their histories before the show was even broadcast.

“It was good fun,” she laughs. “Though I preferred writing EastEnders, which taught me discipline. It really developed my writer’s muscle.”

But the work she is most proud of is Behzti... probably.

“At first there was such a lot of negativity surrounding it,” she says. “But since the initial anger I’ve had so many positive and enthusiastic letters from readers of the play. Especially from students.

“Behzti is now taught at a lot of colleges and universities, and that makes me really proud. Hopefully people will accept, at last, that I never tried to offend or anger. I just wanted to tell my story, and express myself the way I wanted to.

“As a writer you have to be driven by your imagination, what you want to say, what you want to explore. You have to have the right to do that freely. Part of what is in all our imaginations is dark and difficult. I don’t think the way to deal with that is to shut it down. You have to explore it.”

* Behud (Beyond Belief) is at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry from March 27 until April 10. For more information go to www.belgrade.co.uk.