SILENCE at Birmingham Rep - Review

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Tue 23 Apr 2024 - Sat 27 Apr 2024

Tara Theatre’s SILENCE takes us into the past to hear people’s experiences during the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 – and it makes for a harrowing show.

The production is based on Kavita Puri’s book Partition Voices: Untold British Stories in which she interviewed people who had made new lives in the UK about what they had seen and felt as their country was torn apart to create three countries – India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan.

With the divisions created topdown and based on religious lines, people of different faiths turned on each other in a tsunami of violence which saw around one million killed and many more injured.

Millions of people moved from India to Pakistan and vice versa and photographs of the time show trains overburdened with those trying to escape the violence of their former homes.



The silence of the production’s title is rooted in the fact so many of those survivors then locked up their memories, choosing to focus on a new life rather than the old. But when Puri turned the key in their minds, images of horror, memories of betrayal and incomprehension poured forth.

The show, written by a team of four, was originally directed and developed for tour by Abdul Shayek before he died and the baton has been taken up by Birmingham Rep’s associate director Iqbal Khan.

SILENCE features a cast of six who take on all the roles – some being the survivors’ children and grandchildren who are now hearing their family histories for the first time. And others are the parents and grandparents reaching into the past to recall their experiences.

It is tough listening. There is the child who played in the river and saw a coconut bobbing by until he realised it was a severed head. There is the young boy who saw his grandmother’s house torched while she was still in it. There are the girls murdered, raped and mutilated.

But there are also moments where the light of human kindness shines and where even a touch of humour is allowed to slip in. There are villagers who hide neighbours, those who urge others to flee before it is too late, those who protect at their own risk.

The cast, Aaron Gill, Alexandra D’Sa, Asif Khan, Bhasker Patel, Mamta Kaash and Tia Dutt give their all to the performance stepping into the shoes of the people whose stories they are telling to bring the narrative alive. They take on the accents, the movements and the incomprehension of those whose stories they are sharing so that each experience is firmly rooted in each character.



Designed by Rachana Jadhav, who created the projection with Simeon Miller, the set is largely a series of doors which are laden with so much meaning – are these the doors of homes which were destroyed, do they symbolize the movement from one place to another, are they the doors of the new homes in the UK? The projection also aids the storytelling, particularly when it recreates children’s drawings or reveals the flames burning their homes.

Powerful and poignant, SILENCE is all the more shocking when we are reminded that these divisions weren’t just a matter of history in India – people continue to discriminate and kill today based on the fear of ‘The Other’. Frightening relevant, the show shows us both the worst and the best of humanity.

SILENCE plays the Studio at Birmingham Rep until April 27, see here.

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