Comedian Shappi Khorsandi was nearing the end of her act at a packed Chorley Little Theatre when a group of men trooped in from the bar carrying drinks. Her gentle chiding of their decision to put lager ahead of laughter – ‘you’re like characters from Viz’ - won her sympathetic applause from the audience, most of whom were enjoying the show. Chorley Little Theatre plays host to a lot of comedy, but a comedy club where the punters can wander freely to and from the bar while the stand up is in mid flow it is not.
In truth this was another coup for Chorley Little Theatre and a full house had turned out to see Ms Khorsandi, who wanted to know who’d heard her on Radio 4, seen her on Michael McIntyre or ‘just been dragged along?'
She hadn’t heard of Chorley - ‘I thought it was somewhere near London’ – and engaged with members of the audience throughout the auditorium to find out who was there with friends. When one woman explained that she’d met her friends through Rainbows which were 'little brownies' Khorsandi replied: 'I thought we'd got past all that.'
It was her first foray into tackling the casual racism she has encountered since arriving in the UK from Iran in the 1970s with her parents. As a child her brother responded to taunts of 'Oi, Gandhi! with 'Oi, Churchill!' and she recently criticised a national newspaper for allowing its dating site members to choose the skin colour of potential partners. When the man handling her complaint suggested a date she wrote back declining his offer: 'Too brown.'
Khorshandi handles the subjects of parenthood and moving to another country with aplomb. Her riff on the topic of siblings, the central theme of the show, started off as an affectionate portrait of her older brother Peyvand, but made some wry observations on the attitudes of parents towards growing numbers of children, and how the third child of the family gets neglected, a comment that resonated with my youngest-of-three-siblings partner.
Going through a divorce, she revelled in explicit details of her adult sex life, including a fling with a rock star, and some audience members will never be able to watch The Good Life on TV in the same light, but her gag about the Edinburgh Festival puppeteer who tried to put his hand up her skirt (‘you’re not at work now’) was the highlight of this section.
Her strongest and most distinctive material revolves around her family and her stories of arriving in England from her time in pre Revolutionary Iran, including watching children’s television: ‘We had the Magic Roundabout but Florence had to wear a hijab’. The Wombles was also different, Orinoco being blown to bits after the family were forced to serve as minesweepers in the Iran-Iraq war. Morph was the first non white person she saw on English television.
Her father was once the subject of an assassination plot and even this gets woven into the act. The 10 year old Khorsandi writes to Ayatollah Khomeini, apologising that she hasn’t written in Farsi but ‘I’m dyslexic in two languages’ and pleading that she loves her dad ‘but I love my brother more.’ He didn't write back. But when she later visits Iran she’s pleased to see that on the signed execution warrant the Ayatollah had underlined that the children should not be harmed.
Other vignettes included her auntie visiting England and, after experiencing ten years of the Iran-Iraq war in a bomb shelter, going out on Bonfire Night and throwing herself to the floor at the first sound of fireworks.
At the conclusion of a ninety minute set, she appeared genuinely pleased at the reception she’d received. ‘You're nice, Chorley,’ she said, and seemed to mean it. A shame those members of the audience who chose to go to the bar couldn't have paid her the same respect.
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