An excellent sixth-form drama project: Santi & Naz, at Soho Theatre, reviewed 

Santi & Naz is a drama set in the Punjab in 1947 that uses an ancient and thrilling storyline about domestic violence. The main characters are a pair of young lesbians who plot to kill Naz’s bridegroom, Nadim, on the eve of the wedding. They discuss stabbing or poisoning him and eventually they decide to drown him in the village lake.

There are many motives for this murder. Santi and Naz hate men. They detest the custom of marriage which forces women to endure painful sexual couplings. And Santi fears that Naz will be unsafe in her marital home because ‘Muslim husbands beat their wives’. Nadim has already been discourteous to Naz by calling her a ‘witch’ and using other unkind remarks, in Urdu, which are left untranslated. For these crimes, the girls sentence Nadim to death.

However, this fascinating set-up arrives in the final moments of the play and not at the start, where it belongs. And the girls quickly talk themselves out of committing murder and downgrade their attack to a harmless prank. They plan to shove Nadim into the lake, steal his clothes and force him to walk home naked. But even this jape doesn’t materialise because independence day arrives on 14 August, 1947, and the entire country is engulfed by sectarian violence.

Nadim’s marriage to Naz is forgotten as the two girls contemplate the horrific aftermath of partition. This is a very strange play. It wants to teach us about Indian society in the 1940s while simultaeously assuming that we’re experts on the subject already. The girls spend a lot of time performing satirical sketch routines. Santi mocks Gandhi’s strangulated speech tones and Naz impersonates the swaggering grandiloquence of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.