I stood outside the house I spent my first five years in and marvelled this morning. 110 Jubilee Street looks a bit beyond my price range now.

On one side, Millers’, the old Jewish grocery — where my brother and I were treated to broken biscuits from a big jar — is now an undertakers. On the other, Dempsey Street school is a block of luxury apartments with twenty-five penthouses. 
  
I was on my way to speak to a classroom of fifteen year-old Muslim girls in Mulberry School, a few blocks away on the Commercial Road, about What Fatima Did at Hampstead Theatre. What she did was wear a hijab. So did all the girls in Mulberry.

It was a blisteringly good session, not because of anything I said or did, but because of their reactions to the play and their articulacy of approval and disapproval. My job was to try and show how their thoughts and words might be translated into a review.

The exercise is part of a very good programme supported by David and Alexandra Scholey, patrons of Hampstead Theatre, which includes low-price tickets and workshops around the issues raised in Atiha Sen Gupta’s lively play.

All the girls knew about the music used, the role of the teacher in the play, what Fatima (who never appears) might have been up to in the holidays and the reasons why George might have wrapped himself in the national flag and then shaped it into his own headscarf.

But few of them had wrestled with these topics in their reviews. Talking is one thing, writing another. It’s hard, as every professional critic knows, and the way the discussion took off impressed upon me even more just how very hard it can be.

The school uniform at Mulberry is, well, mulberry, and ninety per cent of the girls wear matching hijabs; the condition of wearing them is that they must blend in with that uniform. But does the headscarf draw attention to the wearer, or is it a modesty veil?

They were still arguing among themselves when we ran out of time.

Not many of these girls go the theatre as a matter of course, but they are all going to see Mixed Up North at the nearby Wilton’s Music Hall and I’d love to know how they measure that experience against the Hampstead outing…
 
As I was in the area I decided to walk down Commercial Road to Alie Street, where the Half Moon Theatre — scene of early plays by Billy Colvill and Steve Gooch, Simon Callow’s Arturo Ui and wonderful productions by Rob Walker (Che’s father) and Pam Brighton –  opened inside a de-consecrated synagogue in 1972.

It was with a sharp pang of nostalgic loss that I realised it’s a far longer period of time back to those days than it was forward from my birthdate in the Mile End Hospital to the productions I was remembering.

Alie Street was in the centre of the old garment district and you can still see some derelict grey buildings advertising ladies fashions and clothing a la mode. But mostly, the area is now dwarfed by huge commercial buildings.

The Half Moon moved to other premises in the Whitechapel Road many years ago. The site has been knocked through and appropriated by the White Swan pub next door, and it does retain some of the old atmosphere in its reincarnation by the Shepherd Neame brewery.

But there’s no plaque, or even wall sign, to indicate that here was once a most beautiful wooden synagogue, then a famous fringe theatre.

There’s no blue plaque on 110 Jubilee Street either, but that’s a little more understandable.

My mother tells me she used to lie awake at night listening to the clanking of the milk churns as they were delivered in the small hours to the dairy opposite.

What dairy? It’s a housing estate, and quite a decent looking council housing estate, too.

I walked up to the Commercial Road to light a candle for my family in the huge St Mary and St Michael Church, “the cathedral of the East End.” There was an attendance of just eight parishioners for the early morning Mass.
  
Next, I crossed Sidney Street, where anarchists barricaded themselves in against the police one hundred years ago. The whole area is seething with memories and history, and it was a pleasant jolt to be brought back to new realities by the girls in Mulberry.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.