Fringe Binge 2017 Show #43 - Shazia Mirza - With Love From St. Tropez; Gilded Balloon, 1930, 14-Aug-17

Shazia Mirza is a fairly well-know comic, writer and television/radio contributor while not quite breaking through into the mainstream. I had seen some of her material before but was slightly reticent about going to see her for an hour - there's only so much of being told how wrong, as a white heterosexual male, I am about everything and responsible for all the problems in the world.

Nonetheless it was a good show and a good performance. Born in Birmingham to Pakistani Muslim immigrant parents you can imagine what a number of her themes are. Fortunately it wasn't trowelled on too thickly.

The title of her show comes from a holiday she had recently in the south of France, and is a springboard into a routine about the burkini, nude beaches, transparent bikini bottoms and how police in France are now fining women on beaches for covering up. She ranged over a number of other topics too, including a battle she had with officialdom about her ethnic status. She had ticked in a form "British" but they had come back with "Yes, but where from originally?". "Birmingham". "No, originally?". "Originally, from Birmingham." And so on and so forth. Interesting and funny stuff

She concluded her routine with quite the impassioned plea - starting off with the controversial statement (to a predominantly white, middle-class Guardian-reading weekday audience) that Donald Trump's "pussy-grabbing" wasn't that bad. Using that hook she proceeded to lay into the priorities of the Feminist movement, specifically that while they could put together huge marches to object to a sexist pig in the White House, the movement was curiously reticent about putting together marches to protest about the 100s of millions of Muslim women worldwide kept in abject slavery, sold into marriages, abused, treated worse than livestock and honour-killed by family members for the vaguest "dishonour". Powerful, affecting stuff.

I wasn't really sure whether I enjoyed the set or not. She is a thoroughly professional, well-practiced stand-up and clearly passionate. But I left her show feeling more and more that I was not just part of the problem, I WAS the problem. What can I do about it?  I had one last show to go this evening but was sore and a little deflated so wandered back to the flat, pondering my white male privilege and general ennui ...