WE are all works in progress. Struggling with our identities in our own little ways, and for playwright Cosh Omar, a British-born Turkish Cypriot, it is an issue that cuts to the core of his work.
“Identity is something I have been dealing with all my life,” the 40-year-old north Londoner explains. “Am I Turkish? Cypriot? British? Muslim? We all live one life behind our front door and another on the outside.”
A trained actor, Cosh drew on this life experience in his first play, The Battle of Green Lanes, which was based on his involvement with a radical Islam group, and it is a theme he has returned to for his second play The Great Extension, which opens at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, next week.
A comedy set in the leafy London suburbs, the production focuses on Hassan, a second generation Turk who lives a blissful, if somewhat eccentric bachelor existence, until one morning he wakes to the devastating realisation that something happened the night before that could have dire consequences for him and his carefree lifestyle. The problem is, he can’t quite remember what it was.
“It’s about two entities that get together, but who fear being passified by the other, losing themselves and losing their identity through compromising.”
But that is just the surface story, as Cosh continues: “But what it’s really about is Turkey’s bid to be part of Europe and the fear that is in Europe of a Muslim country being in its midst. There is also some fear on the other hand of losing that Turkish and Islamic identity.”
As well as penning the play, Finchley-based Cosh stars as the protagonist, a man “who has worked very hard on his beautiful home but who slowly sees that world fall apart”.
Growing up in Tottenham, Cosh’s own world revolved around his parents’ beliefs and watching his father, a Sufi Iman, performing verses in what for him was “my first experience of theatre”.
Television also provided him with inspiration and he found himself identifying with the Jewish and Italian voices that were given a platform on American shows.
“They were ethnic voices I could relate to, the outsiders,” Cosh remarks. “I would go into my community and hear that outsider voice, but a very different one, a British one, and the conversations just stayed in my mind. Then I would write it down and people started calling me a writer.”
l The Great Extension runs at the Theatre Royal Stratford East from Friday, October 16 to Saturday, November 14. Tickets: www.stratfordeast.c
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