Heartfelt, feel-good, this is a highly enjoyable performance. A Scottish-South East Asian fusion of music, story-telling and gig theatre, Where Mountains Meet is composed and written by Scottish/Pakistani Anne Wood. It is also a true life story about her journey as a young girl to Pakistan in search of her identity and to meet her father for the first time.
A Scottish-South East Asian fusion of music, story-telling and gig theatre
As the audience enters a pleasant atmosphere is created with a fusion of Scottish and Pakistani music played on electric harp, violin, tanpura drone and sitar played by the musicians on stage. The three actors, dressed in half tartan, half Pakistani gold embroidered outfits, are welcoming, moving amongst the audience showing us to tables cafe-style set with china tea cups for kahna (green tea flavoured with cardamom and cinnamon) and ladoo (delicious saffron sugary cakes). An effective minimal set (ideal for touring) of three tall triangular sheets to the side of the room on which coloured lights play symbolise the Scottish Highlands and the Himalayas. Pebbles of gneiss from the Highlands are also set out on the tables and have an emotional role to play in the script. Most amusingly a song about ‘The Moine Thrust’ provides an easily digestible geological history of the mountain ranges.
Through song, a series of tiny dramatic scenes and some dance we follow young Anne played by Iman Akhtar (while real life Anne plays the violin) on her journey to meet her father. Throughout, there is a fusion of Scottish folktales with Urdu and Punjabi poetry, traditional ballads, strathspeys or reels with South Asian Teental. Particularly beautiful are the contrast and similarities of the solo Gaelic singing by Mary Macmaster on electric harp and the solo singing of raags by Rakae Jamil on sitar where despite the differences, there are similarities of tonalities and decoration.
Anne’s father, a jovial charmer, is played with great sensitivity by Jamie Zubairi expertly combining warmth with embarrassment at the social predicament his daughter has placed him in. Farouq, her half-brother, played by Hassan Javed, also plays an array of bit parts: bazaar salesmen, an old woman, with great humour. At times the emotional scenes between father and daughter verge on sentimentality but Iman Akhtar as Anne plays with a charming blend of western-style independence then painful confusion and incomprehension of her father’s treatment of her. It is left to Farouq in his central role as half-brother to explain to Anne that she is ‘taboo’. Despite the feel-good factor of the show as a whole, it faces up courageously to the harsh reality of attitudes to illegitimacy in Pakistan.
However, we are left with so much to admire and rejoice in, to appreciate the similarities and differences in Scottish and Pakistani culture through the music and song but above all, to sympathise with this poignant story and assert our common humanity. The audience were ecstatic.
