Written by Hafsah Aneelah Bashir, directed by Nikki Mailer, with visual projections and sound design by Kooj Chuhan/Metaceptive Media. Produced by Outside The Frame Arts. Performed as a part of the PUSH festival at HOME Manchester on 18th and 19th January 2019 in Stage 1.
The following by James Varney from his review in Exeunt magazine describes what the play is about:
Cuts of the Cloth is science fiction. In an unspecified future, a Muslim woman is kept in a human museum, as a resource in a governmental programme for warning against the dangers of ‘Islamisation’, radicalism, ‘Islamist ideology’ and other vague but threatening-sounding words used to pigeonhole British Muslims. Hafsah Aneela Bashir plays a woman reduced to an exhibit number. In whatever ‘present’ we inhabit together, she is placid, as if wiped clean – calmly saluting peace like an automaton. As she recounts her stories, ostensibly of warning, we see the passionate, human woman she used to be. (…) And the sci-fi framing does what all good science fiction does; the real story is in the past, which is to say our present. Bashir’s protagonist is detained and searched at border control, her students are investigated for having conversations which are too political.”
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