Keep up to date with the weekly Nestruck on Theatre newsletter. Sign up today.
The Wrong Bashir is a classic mistaken-identity comedy that continually skirts the edges of farce.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
- Title: The Wrong Bashir
- Written by: Zahida Rahemtulla
- Director: Paolo Santalucia
- Actors: Sharjil Rasool, Bren Eastcott, Sugith Varughese, Nimet Kanji, Vijay Mehta, Pamela Mala Sinha, Salim Rahemtulla, Zaittun Esmail and Parm Soor
- Company: Crow’s Theatre
- Venue: Streetcar Crowsnest
- City: Toronto
- Year: To Sunday, June 9, 2024
This past fall, Crow’s Theatre opened what’s turned out to be a smash 40th-anniversary season with The Master Plan, Michael Healey’s scalpel-sharp satire of Toronto’s ill-fated efforts to build a Google-backed smart community on the waterfront (based on Sideways, written by Globe and Mail arts reporter Josh O’Kane).
To close it, the company has chosen another comedy about community, albeit a much more genial one. The Wrong Bashir, by Zahida Rahemtulla, is set among the city’s well-established Ismaili Muslim enclave, where the issue isn’t new technology but the passing on of a 14-century-old religious tradition.
Bashir Ladha (Sharjil Rasool) couldn’t care less about it. The young Ismaili-Canadian philosophy student has barely set foot in the local khane (temple) in years. He’s more interested in exploring his options – reading Sartre, hanging with Buddhist monks and creating a podcast called The Smiling Nihilist. In true hipster style, he records the latter on cassette tapes to be played on vintage boom boxes.
His bemused father, Sultan (Sugith Varughese), doesn’t know what to make of him. His worried mother, Najma (Nimet Kanji), whose cultural references are stuck in the 1970s, is afraid he’s becoming a pot-smoking hippie. So, imagine their shock – and delight – when they get a call telling them that their son has been chosen for the coveted role of student mukhi, the spiritual adviser for the Ismaili congregation’s young people.
Soon after, two members of the selection committee arrive at the Ladha home to meet him and, as the title says, they soon realize they’ve got the wrong Bashir. If listening to his gloomy podcast isn’t a clue, hearing his awkward Arabic certainly is.
What ensues is a classic mistaken-identity comedy that continually skirts the edges of farce, but eventually settles into the kind of intergenerational immigrant drama of which Kim’s Convenience is the exemplar.
It’s a familiar theme – the expectations and misunderstandings between immigrant parents and their born-in-Canada children. The details, however, are fresh. Rahemtulla, a young B.C. playwright, uses her debut play partly to paint a lovingly humorous picture of Canada’s Ismaili community and partly to pay tribute to its founders, the refugees who fled from Uganda in the early 1970s after dictator Idi Amin summarily expelled South Asians from the country.
The Wrong Bashir received its premiere from Touchstone Theatre in Vancouver last year and Rahemtulla has transplanted the setting to Toronto for the Crow’s production. All the better for local audiences to relate to it. Sultan has spent his career working for the Toronto Transit Commission, Bashir attends Toronto Metropolitan University, Najma (still stuck in the past) refers distastefully to bohemian Queen Street, etc. Curiously, however, there’s no mention of Toronto’s most famous Ismaili landmark, the splendid Aga Khan Museum.
The show is directed with zest by Paolo Santalucia, whose own, darker play about family, Prodigal, ran at Crow’s last season. He guides a choice cast that includes such veterans as Varughese and Pamela Mala Sinha (as Gulzar, the khane busybody), along with new talents Rasool, who is a perpetually anxious, unhappy-looking Bashir (nihilism will do that to you), and Bren Eastcott, who is far more grounded as Nafisa, his younger-but-wiser teen sister.
The scene-stealers, however, are Vijay Mehta and Parm Soor as the committee members, Al Nashir and Mansour. The pair make a terrific comedy team, Mehta playing dapper, diplomatic straight man to the hilariously expressive Soor. With saucer eyes and an ingratiating grin, his Mansour is both endearing and gets the biggest laughs. He persistently mishears The Smiling Nihilist as The Ismaili Nihilist, which come to think of it would be a good alternate title for the play.
There’s some poignancy to Mansour, too, as we discover the elderly man’s failing eyesight may be to blame for the Bashir mix-up. But the most touching performance comes from Salim Rahemtulla as Dadabapa, the Alzheimer’s-stricken grandfather, who arrives with his wife Dadima (Zaittun Esmail) and Gulzar to congratulate Bashir on his appointment.
Dementia is a tricky thing to treat as comedy, but a subtle Rahemtulla succeeds with the help of some sensitive writing. It is Dadabapa who, in his confusion, also inadvertently helps to bridge the gap between Bashir and his father when he reveals the sacrifices that Sultan has made to build a life for his family in a new country.
This is an old-fashioned play and Ken Mackenzie gives it a pleasantly old-fashioned set on a proscenium stage in the Guloien Theatre. The Ladhas’ cozy house looks genuinely lived in, right down to a tea towel hanging askew on a kitchen cupboard door, and the bric-a-brac on the living-room shelves speak to the family’s Ismaili culture as well as its East African past. If you’re in the front rows, you can also spot a copy of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything – surely belonging to Bashir. Sound designer Jacob Lin adds to the atmosphere with a lively Bollywood soundtrack.
One caveat: playwright Rahemtulla plunges us into the Ismaili community from the first moments of Act 1, with a swift succession of words, expressions and in jokes that, for the unfamiliar, may make you feel like you’re watching a foreign-language film without subtitles. Be patient. By the time The Wrong Bashir is over, you’ll feel as if you’ve come to know it better.