Letting Muslim women find their voice

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Rarely in our history can there have been a group so commented about while simultaneously so little spoken to as Muslim women.

This was the starting point for actor and now writer Stephanie Street, when she decided on her first play, Sisters, which gives a voice to Muslim women.

Its director, Ruth Carney, says: "The play opens with a character on stage saying, 'So you want to know about Muslim women? Well we're not one thing, we're seven, eight, nine, 10 different things. We are the mother, the daughter the sister, the career woman'. For me, that's fundamentally what the play is about. It's about these women and their experience of life."

Street, who was raised in Singapore, is half-Asian and half-English. After graduating from Cambridge, she studied at LAMDA and has gone on to carve out a career as a professional actor both on stage and screen, appearing in Holby City and Red Cap.

"It was 2005 and I was working in a temp job, going crazy and thinking there is something that I have to do about this," says Street.

She began toying with the idea of interviewing Muslim women about their lives and emailed a number of university Islamic societies, planning on turning the interviews into a play.

"I met this young woman, the president of her university society, and when

I get home and transcribed the interview I just thought, 'This is absolute dynamite'," she says.

She was then cast in the verbatim play, The Laramie Project, about the 1998 murder of University of Wyoming gay student Matthew Shepard. It was directed by Carney and staged in London.

"I remember picking up the Laramie Project and thinking, 'This is unlike anything I've ever read before', the idea that you might be able to meet someone and talk to them and represent them in a play was so exciting, so I started thinking about that idea," says Street.

"Then the July 7 bombings happened and like with all Asian people in the country, everyone started treating you a little bit differently.

"I'm not Muslim but that didn't stop people at all.

"I grew up in Singapore around lots of Muslim women and all of a sudden this became a huge subject. Suddenly, I knew what I had to look at, I had a focus for the idea."

Carney, who in 2005 directed the verbatim play The Lemon Princess at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and Street got together to begin working on the project and workshopped the idea at the National Theatre.

They realised they had a idea with great potential and Street was set on a path which saw her interview dozens of Muslim women.

She says: "You must have that experience sometimes when you interview people and think, 'This is brilliant, just keep talking'. Well, that happened a lot," says Street.

"There was a moment when these two women started talking about sex, and I mean properly talking about sex."

Carney interrupts.

"That's ended up in the play, it's absolutely brilliant stuff and it's so funny. It's one of our favourite bits."

Street says: "While I just wanted to talk to people and hear about their stories and their experiences, there were definitely some things I wanted to find.

"For example, I knew I wanted to speak to a gay Muslim woman. I'd not met any before, but it just made sense – I know lots of gay women and I know lots of Muslim women, so I knew there must be somewhere that those two circles of the Venn diagram cross."

As a non-Muslim woman, the research period also allowed Street to find out more about the contentious issue of Muslim women wearing veils.

"The thing I'm most glad to have learnt is a proper understanding of why women cover up, a proper understanding and empathy of how liberating it can be and it not just being a statement of identity or form of oppression. All of these things exist, but for an enormous number of women – and I understand this quite viscerally now – it is an emancipating thing."

Street says: "The funny thing is the number of times I've said why isn't this play on now? There have been so many moments that were

the exact right moment for this play."

Carney adds: "And this is the exact right moment now, which proves that things haven't changed that much.

"Without a doubt, the voice of Muslim women is one of the most under-represented voices in our society.

"Lots of white liberals – and I include myself in that group – have opinions about Muslim women, but have never spoken to one.

"How can I have an opinion and say you shouldn't be wearing that, when I don't fully understand why a Muslim woman is covering herself – and before I worked on this play had never spoken to a Muslim woman."

Writer and director, realising that the play can sound like a polemic, are keen to point out that the show is non-threatening.

"It's actually a very domestic setting, very welcoming," says Carney.

In the rehearsal room this is obvious. Actors, including Denise Black, who played Denise Osbourne on Coronation Street and Lena Kaur, best known as Leila Roy in Hollyoaks, are cast members.

The rehearsal room is unusual, in that it is almost entirely female – even theatre remains an industry where the sexes are unequal.

It takes no more than 10 seconds to realise that the jokes and laughs have been coming thick and fast, but that all are heavily invested, emotionally, in this play.

That it is women giving a voice to their "sisters" gives the room an almost palpable feeling of power.

Denise Black, the matriarch of the play (and of the rehearsal room) kicks off the rehearsal – and we hear the voice of a Muslim woman.

Sisters, Sheffield Studio, March 11 to 27.