One aspect of conflict she examines is transphobia within the lesbian community. Infighting goes all the way through the LGBT community, but it’s a community we can’t afford to lose.”
“I was interested in exploring community,” Qureshi says, “but also how to hold that together when differences threaten to overwhelm it. When a new woman joins the choir, friendships are formed and relationships are threatened.
The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs is part of Qureshi’s efforts to address these ideas of exclusion. Why isn’t there enough space for all of us?” “I remember there being this period when I was going up for interviews and I’d see the same people waiting outside,” she says. “I think queerness runs through everything I write,” Qureshi says, “but so does brownness.” She has found the theatre industry stifling at times, with limited opportunities for writers of colour. The play does ask questions about race, specifically about British attitudes towards immigration. “It’s not the main thrust of this play,” she says of Ministry, “but I hope it’s baked into it, because it’s baked into me.” Since then, she has felt pressure to write Asian and Muslim stories. “I remember when this group of funeral directors came to see the play,” Qureshi says, “and I was like, ‘Oh my God, if I’ve got stuff wrong, they’ll be so cross!’” But they loved it, and stayed afterwards to take a picture with the cast. The catalyst for the story, which dealt with the relationship between Islam and homosexuality, was a couple who ran a funeral parlour refusing to hold a funeral for a young gay Muslim man. Her breakout play, The Funeral Director, won the 2018 Papatango new writing prize. ‘Theatre is a kind of communal healing’ … Iman Qureshi. “That theatre is a kind of communal healing.” She saw the same thing at Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and felt an ache, realising she had never seen anything that gave a similar space to lesbian stories on stage: “I don’t think queer women have been given enough opportunities to sit in a dark room together holding hands, acknowledging those old wounds, and hearing their stories told.
“I watched an auditorium full of gay men wipe their damp eyes and hold hands in the dark,” she says. The drama came about after Qureshi saw The Inheritance, Matthew Lopez’s epic inspired by EM Forster’s Howards End. This is the raucous rehearsal for The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs, Iman Qureshi’s new play about a queer choir and the struggle for harmony within it. “Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings” becomes instead “the soft brush of pubic hair on my chin”. A group of women are singing along to My Favourite Things, the old favourite from The Sound of Music, except the original words have been switched with lesbian-specific lyrics.