Meet Atiha Gupta

“Gosh, I didn’t know Asian girls could write like that!”

Compliment? Insult? Both? These were the words uttered aloud by the audience member sitting next to me after watching the first play I ever wrote. What were Asian girls supposed to write like? Was she expecting bangles, bindis and biryanis?

You often hear the phrase ‘the personal is political’ but for me ‘the political is personal’; I grew up in an intensely political family. My communist grandfather fought the British out of India (NB not single-handedly), my feminist mum fought for justice and equality and because my brother was born severely disabled, every battle had to be fought even for basic things like access to education. It was in this crucible that I was forged. I cannot uncouple my writing from it. I think telling stories was my way of reimagining the deeply unequal, unjust world that I found myself in. 

The late, great thinker David Graeber observed that “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently”. It is in our hands, in our pens, in our QWERTY boards to rewrite the world.

Everything is a story – your day at work, your deceased grandma who was such a character, the government telling you the only way is austerity. This is why the art of storytelling is so crucial – it is a way of upsetting and contradicting the status quo that rules over all of our lives. 

Of course there are other ways of upsetting said status quo – joining a union, marching and demonstrating but on the streets we chant in binaries (What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!), whereas on the stage we whisper in nuance. The brilliant journalist Hannah Giorgis wrote that “art makes visible the pain that buries itself in the cavities that logic and reason alone cannot access. It forces its audience to contend with truths that may otherwise be buried in the perfunctory rhythm of everyday life”.

Being a freelance writer in the British theatre industry is not an easy position to occupy – there are no government subsidies to keep you afloat, you never get off from the ‘feast or famine’ rollercoaster and your work is constantly scrutinised and critiqued. It is also a deeply lonely job – sitting on your own (often in pyjamas) and tapping away at a laptop. I am happiest when I am in the rehearsal room (not in pyjamas) reassuring an actor that their character would say that line… 

Regarding the solitary nature of the job, I have found the act of mentoring (both being mentored and being a mentor) to be incredibly helpful – the dock leaf to the sting of working alone. As a young playwright, I was mentored by the inspirational writers Roy Williams and Tanika Gupta and now I mentor new playwrights and delight in their development (this was how I knew I was getting old - when a load of requests to mentor came flooding in…).

If a writer has done their job properly, you root for their protagonist who is your way into the world of the play – you laugh with them, you cry for them. It changes you. You are moved in a way that you wouldn’t be reading a newspaper article on the same ‘person’. Who the protagonist is matters. I have seen enough plays about middle class white couples breaking up to last me a lifetime.

Asian girl or otherwise, I want to tell the stories of those who stitch the red carpet, rather than those who stand on it.