Review: VITAMIN D, Soho Theatre

Moving back to her parents after a failed marriage raises a host of questions Larki can’t or won’t answer. Aunts and false friends meddle in her business while her life falls apart around her.

Debut playwright Saher Shah’s is a bittersweet look at individual renewal and the disillusionment that comes with social conventions. Directed by Melina Namdar, Shah herself stars in the lead role. Part intergenerational comedy, part introspective personal drama, with a dash of spoken word poetry. Vision is a clear, fresh take on how to pick yourself up after an emotional crisis, but the script may still need the care and attention that directing doesn’t provide. This is one of those productions that shows potential for television.

Everyone is very two-dimensional, except for Larki, who is reflective and profound throughout the piece – especially when it comes to her poetic interludes. Although the piece develops as her journey unfolds, the exchanges can remain quite artificial. Namdar doesn’t help much by frontally staging his performers and having them perform tasks that, while initially reasonable, become unnecessary and unnaturally repeated by the actors to occupy the time while they deliver their lines.

Behind the creaky acting, overacting and underacting at the beginning lies a fascinating, provocative reflection on gender roles and traditions in the South Asian experience. Shah seamlessly weaves her native language into the text, adding musicality to her writing, fearlessly risking alienating some of her audience. Pakistani culture is not only represented, celebrated, but also critiqued. Shah creates a delicate balance in her observations, catching herself when she instinctively succumbs to the patriarchal structure she grew up in, but also understanding and empathizing with the constraints of her family.

The tension of expectation and pressure on her is balanced by the flair of situational farce. The mock sympathetic glances of her aunts, the snideness and prying of her friends, and the difficult relationship with her mother are mostly played for laughs – and Shah really is a funny playwright. This penchant for humor is at odds with Shah’s somber lines. It is then that she opens up with profound insights and intimate truths. It is an intriguing harmony of bittersweet fun.

Anshula Bain and Rosaleen Burton steal the show as Larka’s friend and her stereotypically white colleague, respectively. It’s impossible to predict where they’ll take the scene once they’re on stage. The result is consistently funny.

To sum up, Vitamin D shows a side of South Asian customs that clashes with contemporary Western intersectional feminism. Shah ends her debut on a moving note, a powerful monologue about the normalization of women’s suffering. She paints a precise picture, asking herself and the audience what comes next. That alone is worth the journey.

Vitamin D runs at the Soho Theatre until September 21.

Photo credit: Charles Flint

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