Culture
15 MARCH 2021
Him and Her, then and now: Sarah Solemani on her role in the comedy that refused to laugh at people on benefits Joe Greaney, MA Music in Development Rishi Sunak has made a big decision. Following public pressure and predicting a backlash from his own MPs, the Chancellor has reluctantly decided to keep the £20 uplift to Universal Credit until September. Although the uplift is set to end abruptly in the Autumn, this extension will insulate countless low-income families against the devastating financial impact of the Covid-19 crisis. It is remarkable that Sunak, an instinctively hawkish and wholly Thatcherite politician, would even hesitate to cut the UK’s welfare budget at a time of record high Government spending given the opportunity. Not so long ago the Conservative Party freely attacked the undeserving poor. The coalition government specialised in stirring up moral outrage against easy targets. Discussing the welfare system in 2012, David Cameron said he wanted to ‘strike a better balance between those who work and do the right thing, and those who have understood how to work the system.’ The British media joined the pile on, with curtaintwitching headlines about teenage pregnancies, and Channel 4’s documentary series Benefits Street, which allowed viewers to gape freely at welfare claimants in central Birmingham. It was during the coalition government that the BBC Three comedy Him and Her was broadcast. Running between 2010 and 2013, the show was written by Stefan Golaszewski, telling the story of Becky (Sarah Solemani) and Steve (Russell Tovey), an unemployed couple in their mid-twenties living in Walthamstow. Their primary goals involve eating, drinking, sleeping, and having sex. The pair are brought together by their common belief that getting a job will result in, as Steve puts it, having to ‘spend my entire life getting paid basically nothing to do something boring and get treated like s***.’ Unlike other comedies, Him and Her did not laugh at Becky and Steve’s lifestyle. Rather, it celebrated what is essentially a classic story of a loved-up couple. Becky and Steve are frequently visited in their flat by family and friends who live more conventional lives of gainful employment. Visitors from the outside are invariably sour and judgemental, yet they
never shut them out: Becky and Steve are good people. Sarah Solemani appears on my screen, fresh from a school run. I ask how she now looks back on Him and Her, over seven years after the show’s last episode aired. The show has an enduring popularity, which pleases Solemani. She is proud to be asked by fans if the show will return for a lockdown special, and considers this a testament to its quality. Viewers are invited into Steve and Becky’s flat - Solemani describes it as a ‘protective bubble’ - where they can rise above the harsh judgement of the outside world. After several long months of lockdown, the couple’s ongoing confinement in their flat is now familiar to many, while their zen-like tranquility in this environment is desirable. Solemani surmises ‘even though [Steve and Becky] had nothing, it was weirdly aspirational because you just wanted to be like them’. She suggests the show’s power lies in capturing ‘the intimacy of life that is our universal language’. Solemani, now living in Los Angeles, appreciates how the show’s minimalist plot lines allowed viewers to closely observe the intimacy of Becky and Steve’s relationship: Entire episodes of Him and Her hang on the mundane, from the breaking of a shatterproof ruler to the visit of an ex-girlfriend dropping off a CD. She contrasts this with Hollywood’s tendency towards largesse and elaborate storylines. She recalls how, at pilot stage, Him and Her was provisionally titled ‘Young, Unemployed and Lazy’, a name she strongly felt did not reflect the ‘essence’ of the show. Solemani considers how, when she was cast as Becky, she was herself unemployed and claiming benefits. Brought up in a council house by her grandmother from an early age following the passing of her mother, she does not seek a ‘badge of honour’ from her background, but does not ‘forget that legacy’. Her long standing support for the Labour Party and now also for the Black Lives Matter movement, draws on a rich understanding of class consciousness informed by her mother’s Marxism, which also compels her campaigning for the decriminalisation of prostitution and sex workers’ rights. She mentions how, concurrently to the coalition Government and Him and Her, a new debate was developing around class, embodied in Owen Jones’ Chavs: Demonisation of the Working Class. In 2012, Solemani adapted Chavs into
Russell Tovey (left) and Sarah Solemani (right) as Steve and Becky (Credit: Perry Curties)
a warmly-received series of short plays, starring Eastenders actor Natalie Cassidy, at the Lyric Hammersmith. She remembers the development of this counter-narrative as something it was ‘exciting to be part of ’. However, I gather that for Solemani Him and Her was not necessarily about class. Becky and Steve, unlike many working class characters in comedy, were not defined by their situation, but presented to viewers in intimate detail: recognisably human and fully realised. On the occasions when she was recognised in public as Becky, she tells me how it felt as though she and the audience were intimately connected, as if ‘we had all been in bed together’. For me, Him and Her showed that good storytelling can bring many strange bedfellows under the duvet.
‘What’s Left is Right’, or the dying hope of the Palestinian youth Nadia Rabbaa, MSc Violence, Conflict & Development Konrad Suder Chatterjee’s alien art form touches on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a too rarely spoken about way as it questions the lines between resistance and suicide. Despite its pervasive saviorism, there is bravery in opening the door of a conversation around children’s agency over their own death. ‘What’s Left is Right’ will leave the viewer with a lasting feeling of purposeful uneasiness. Shot in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic and portrayed as an online video conversation, the play is a mise en abyme of our new normal. The digitised conversation between a mother, Leyla, and her imprisoned teenage son, Kareem, resonates deeply, with the exception that few of us can relate to life in a war-torn country. Chatterjee’s sensitivity picks up on something only an outsider would notice: the complex yet contradictory mix of despair and desensitisation that decades-long conflicts inflict on a population. The play is a tale of a drift; of a tired hope being passed on to an already worn-out generation. Not seeing the end of the occupation, Kareem perceives the transmission of the fight for liberation as a burden. Reclaiming his agency, the 16 year
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old Palestinian wants to die - with or without the help of his mother. ‘Going home?! I don’t feel at home at all. I feel like I'm migrating between two prisons: the one here, indoors, in detention, and the one there, outdoors, in the village. I’m tired, mum, I’m tired...’ he pleads. Refusing the hyper glorified injunction of resistance, Kareem’s only freedom left is departure. The necropolitics of the State has reached its extreme when the only way to reclaim sovereignty over one’s body is by choosing one’s own death. Chatterjee’s depiction of Israel as a carceral state, borrowed from a Foucauldian analysis of prison, is ubuesque in its depiction. Assisted suicide, or euthanasia, is illegal in Israel as it is in most of the countries form the region. Similarly, under no circumstances would a Palestinian prisoner be allowed access to a computer and internet. These elements of fiction might make Kareem’s story easier to comprehend for a foreign audience, but its white male gaze depletes it of its authenticity. A female Arab writer would probably have displayed a different sensitivity to the importance of cultural representation, as well as portrayed less stereotypical gender roles. Layla’s character reinforces the essentialization of women as loving and caring beings, while her expectations of her son to carry on the resistance reinforces the idea that men ought to be strong and fearless. Queering the characters
by portraying a conversation between a father and his daughter, inspired by the real-life persona of Ahed Tamimi for instance, would have brought a more subtle understanding of the relationship between gender and violence. The unquestionable worth of 'What’s Left is Right’ however lies in its exploration of the complexity of childhood during warfare. Children are ‘the promise of a better future’ Layla says in the play. The figures presented by Chatterjee are dreadful: 10,000 Palestinian children have been detained by Israel in the past 20 years. They have experienced physical and verbal violence, humiliation, intimidation, and have been hand tied, blindfolded, detained from their homes in the middle of the night, not properly informed of their rights, and interrogated without the presence of a family member. What future does that leave Palestine with? One could say that ‘What’s Left is Right’ isn’t merely a play. At the crossroads of art and activism, this first volume – the play is set as a trilogy - embodies a Malrausian stance in its imaginative form of political commitment. Despite a certain amateurism, the play’s objective, to highlight an intolerable situation - the imprisonment of Palestinian children - is a success. As war blurs categories between perpetrators and victims, ‘What’s Left is Right’ is resounding on the limits of resilience.
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