The first 10 minutes of Shappi Khorsandi’s current show are the most intriguing – perhaps because they’re not really its first 10 minutes at all. Khorsandi debuted Oh My Country! From Morris Dancing to Morrissey on last year’s Edinburgh fringe, where it certainly wouldn’t have included a precis of her recent withdrawal from the longlist for the inaugural Jhalak book prize, exclusively for writers of colour. She begins tonight’s set by addressing that experience, in a raw section that contains a few good jokes (“Writer of colour? It makes me sound like a crayon”) and the potential for more, and more considered, commentary – in her next show, perhaps.
It’s the thorniness of that issue, and Khorsandi’s volatile feelings about it, that contrast with the rest of her set – a likable but comparatively uncontentious (to a London audience, at least) account of Khorsandi’s relationship with her Englishness. Having migrated here as an infant, the Iranian-born comic now considers herself English, and has little patience with anyone who disagrees. To those who say, “You weren’t born here,” she replies: “Neither was tea.” To those arguing for a genetic Englishness, she asserts that there’s really no such thing.
This is ground Khorsandi has covered before – in her standup, and in her 2009 book A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English. She’s revisiting it now to mark the 40th anniversary of her arrival in the UK – and, of course, current affairs give the material added spice. Khorsandi talks of being racially abused recently on a tube train – an experience redeemed for her by the retro nature of the invective. Another section of the show takes her to the Calais refugee camp, where an encounter with an exiled Afghan child conjures echoes of, and contrasts with, her own flight from the Middle East.
Sometimes she lands glancing blows (on the concept of “British values,” say), whetting one’s appetite for a knockout she doesn’t hang around to deliver. Elsewhere, jokes about how insignificant she feels when invited on to political TV shows smack of false – or at least, unnecessary – modesty. She slightly overcooks, too, her loathing of her boyfriend’s beauty queen ex: the sentiment is funny, the expression of it rather effortfully hysterical.
But Oh My Country! remains an enjoyable hour for a cause that – orthodox though it may be in some quarters – bears restating. Against the backdrop of the mean and narrow Trump/Farage worldview, Khorsandi makes a compelling argument for nationhood (and identity) as something open and multifaceted. As she is pushed and pulled between her two children (one comically English, the other melodramatically Iranian), as she peruses the French-language motto of our Germanic royal family on her UK passport, and as she recalls her mother’s family back in Iran (“Muslim, in a Church of England sort of way”), a picture emerges of an inclusive England in cheering contrast to the exceptionalist, nativist fantasia towards which some would propel us.
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At Soho theatre, London, until 4 February. Box office: 020-7478 0100. Then touring.
