Sabrina Mahfouz remembers the first time she felt “mixed heritage” in the eyes of the world. She was 14 and applying for Saturday jobs in London when an apparent problem with her identity was pointed out to her. Until then, she had felt happily British, and happily Egyptian, with Guyanese heritage thrown in.
“People I went to see for jobs would show shock at the disparity between my face and the name on my CV. They’d say: ‘I expected you to be a lot more foreign.’ It’s that moment, as a teenager, when you first realise the difference between all that you are and how the world sees you.”
Now 35, the writer represents a cool, confident, plural Britishness. Pale, petite, with a hint of east London hipster in her oversized jumper and statement earrings (she lives in Shoreditch).
She is not one thing but many in her work as well: a poet, performer, playwright, screenwriter and librettist, she has written award-winning plays such as Clean (2013) and Chef (2014); her work has been staged at the National Theatre and in New York; and last year, she was among a group of writers under 40 who were chosen to be fellows of the Royal Society of Literature.
On top of that, an anthology she edited in 2017 called The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslims Write, has just been picked by Emma Watson’s book club, Our Shared Shelf, putting it in such company as Maya Angelou, Barack Obama and Margaret Atwood.
In the preface to the book, Mahfouz asks “Who is ‘us?’” about Muslim women living in the west. But instead of answering the question, she confounds the idea of a unified “us” through the range of subject matter and voices in the collection, and shows Muslim women’s identities to be – of course – joyously multiple, complex and contradictory: “It was really important for me to say that, whatever group you’re doing the anthology for and with, that they are not only asked to talk about their experiences as that identity group. If they are already writers, they should be able to write whatever they want, in whatever form they want.”
Mahfouz has produced a dizzying body of work in the past decade and in an array of forms: she has written 18 plays since 2010, as well as a poetry collection and contributions to more than 10 anthologies, including Nikesh Shukla’s bestselling The Good Immigrant.
Her latest projects are a stage adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s YA novel, Noughts and Crosses, which will be touring the UK from February and at Theatre Royal Stratford East in April, an anthology she has edited called Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Arts and Making It Happen, to be published in the autumn. But there is much else happening as well: a novel (Lost Clubs of London), a libretto (Woman at Point Zero with the Royal Opera House), a screenplay (a biopic about east London rapper Wiley, due to start shooting later this year) and a dance production (with the James Cousins dance company and Zaha Hadid Design).
How does Mahfouz fit it all in? And how does she know when a poem is a poem, a play a play? Kate Tempest has spoken of feeling the itch to write a poem in her stomach, a song in her mouth. Is it the same for Mahfouz? “I’d love to say things happened in different parts of my body and that’s how I got the inspiration, but unfortunately a lot of my high levels of production have been due to financial necessity.”
She has a three-year-old son with her partner, Anthony Anaxagorou, and there is no hiding behind Cyril Connolly’s “pram in the hallway” or ruminating on how it has affected her creativity. She simply has to work and manage motherhood around it. Anaxagorou is a poet, and while it helps to live with a fellow artist who “understands the processes” there is no financial stability in the household. “For me, [writing] is about strategy, timing and scheduling. There’s not any space for spontaneity. Everything has to be planned. It’s difficult when you’re trying to get inspired by something. You can’t, because it has to happen at this time.”
Mahfouz was born in south London, the eldest of three children in a family of limited means. Her mother was a secretary, her father a manager of restaurants, but the family had previously held a very different social standing. Her paternal great-grandfather was a poet in Egypt and friends with the Nobel prize-winning writer Najguib Mahfouz. Her maternal grandfather, meanwhile, came from Guyana in the 1950s, and settled in Middlesbrough, marrying her British grandmother and setting up a jazz club. He would carry his bongo drums around the streets to make his difference more visible, not less, says Mahfouz.
“In other countries, my family was part of a middle class, but once they got to this country they were most definitely working class because they didn’t come with money.”
She lived in Cairo for parts of her childhood but returned to London at 11 to attend Nonsuch high school, a girls’ grammar in Sutton that had high aspirations for its students. It instilled a confidence in her that helped her navigate the naysayers in later years.
The limits of social background were implicitly pointed out in her college years: “I [performed] a Shakespeare monologue and one of my teachers said: ‘It’s good but you should read a monologue by an EastEnders character.’ I began to realise that the way I speak put me in a certain bracket.”
Her parents never tried to direct her passions, so she was able to dabble and experiment as she wished. She began a classical archaeology degree at King’s College London, but changed to English literature and classics because the original course was too scientific for her liking. By her 20s, she had changed direction and signed up to the civil service’s fast-stream programme with the Ministry of Defence. “I wanted to be a spy – or anything that was exciting and took me to different places,” she says. That career was stymied by her not receiving top secret security clearance, for reasons she sees as being linked to class and ethnicity.
So she became a writer and channelled some of those former experiences into her creative work. A theme that crops up repeatedly in her plays and poetry is sex work, which can be traced back to her cash-strapped student days when she worked as a waitress in strip club.
“It began when I was 18 and my dad helped me get a job doing admin in the office of Stringfellows, which in those days was a nightclub, not a strip club. He managed restaurants and everyone knew everyone in that world. So nepotism got me the job! While I was in the office, I had to do the accounts and I saw how much money the waitresses were making as opposed to the strippers. In those days, in that particular club, for every two strippers who made a few grand in a night, 98 would be in debt to the club because they had to pay fees to work, fees for make-up and hair… But the waitresses didn’t have to pay to be there. They got a basic pay plus a percentage of spend on the table.”
Mahfouz left the job to go to university, but when she realised she couldn’t afford to live on hardship grants and student loans, she thought “let’s go and check that waitressing thing out”. It led her into better-paid jobs in upmarket Mayfair nightclubs and what she calls “a world of night-time money”. Years later, she wrote a play about stripping called Dry Ice (2011), which was directed by David Schwimmer, and then One Hour Only (2012) about upmarket brothels. Layla’s Room (2016) was about sex and abuse at school, and her acclaimed poetry collection, How You Might Know Me (2016) was an exploration of four sex workers’ lives.
She didn’t encounter feminism until she was in her early 20s, she says, but since then she has taken it very seriously. The main area where she finds herself in disagreement with some feminist thought is around sex work. When she first left the strip clubs, she worked alongside feminists who sought to eliminate sex work, but increasingly, she thinks that the priority should be to deal with the things that lead women to it in the first place, such as poverty, the threat of financial instability, and abuse.
The aborted career as a spy has also given her material to work with in a play she is developing at the Royal Court, called A History of Water in the Middle East, about the British presence in the region past and present. For it, she has found herself reflecting on her failed security clearance; more generally it is about how Britishness may still be stuck in the narrow strictures of the upper echelons of the civil service, its terms uncontested and untouched by more up-to-date definitions of what it means to be British.
While Mahfouz has clearly excelled in the performing arts industry, she sees it still overwhelmingly tipped in favour of the privileged, with the odd exceptions who are loudly praised. Where racial and gender biases are often recognised, prejudice around class is more rarely addressed, although it’s the principal problem she has faced.
The inception of her forthcoming anthology, Smashing It, came out of a tweet she posted saying something along these lines – that she is only ever asked about her gender and ethnicity. It had such impact that Mahfouz knew she had to take it further. The book will showcase working-class artists in Britain, from grime musicians to playwrights and visual artists, but maybe more importantly for those seeking to enter into the industry, it will offer guidance and advice on how to overcome obstacles, from the financial to the ideological.
Mahfouz is also suspicious of the current feelgood narrative on diversity and inclusion in the arts, and wonders if the correction of imbalances is mainly just happening in the lower tiers. What about the new generation of high-level women in theatre, I ask her, from Vicky Featherstone at the Royal Court to the appointments of female artistic directors at the Kiln and Bush theatres? Yes, she says, it feels like that moment for women in theatre “but we hear of these appointments and they get all the attention, but there are other appointments happening that aren’t women-led, which get less attention and so seem less prevalent. We celebrate [the positive appointments] when they happen, which is great, but it makes the other stuff happening a little bit invisible.
“And because we live in a world where one person at one organisation can make a speech about representation, which can then be repeated on all social media platforms and quoted in all other outlets, and it starts to really feel like something huge is happening from that speech which says ‘look at our offering of representation’. It is amazing to see some [diverse] works being given space and time and money towards marketing, but how much does that change actual numbers? I think people would be surprised at how little it has changed.”
What she found so honest, and refreshing, about Blackman’s dystopia Noughts and Crosses is its reminder that the myth of free choice is just that – a myth. “People act as if that’s not true, that you just need to make the right choice and you’ll be fine. But the myth of free choice leads to the myth of meritocracy.” The story revolves around two teenagers, Sephy and Callum, played by Heather Agyepong and Billy Harris, who live in a racially and socially segregated world (in which Europeans have been enslaved by Africans) but who are determined to love each other across the divide. “I really wanted to focus in on these two characters and how oppressive systems can destroy and determine people’s lives from a young age. In some cases they’re powerless, in others they’re able to take back the power and make some change, but it’s not without a huge amount of sacrifice and pain.”
Mahfouz does not consider herself to be an activist, but she is co-founder of the Critics of Colour Collective, which fights for fairer representation in arts criticism; and also the founder of the Great Wash Workshops, which help working-class writers apply for funding. But this is distinct from her writing, she says. “I do a lot of my work with activists and want to give it to them as a tool for their activism. But I also want to give people the space to enjoy language and consider how they use it. Provoking some change is part of it but not necessarily the ultimate goal.”
She works with young people in workshops too and balks at the idea that they are in any way apathetic about politics. What she sees is a generation that has no choice but to be activists. “There might be a few in a workshop who act like they don’t care but when they get into it, they’ll happily write an activist poem. It’s good, but it’s also annoying because the older generation can just say: ‘It’s OK, these guys are going to sort it out.’ How much pressure are you putting on young people? That’s not cool. We like to blame mental-health issues among the young on iPhones and Instagram and I’m sure they play a part, but maybe it’s also because the weight of what’s wrong with the world is on them to sort out, from climate change to Brexit.”
Brexit has made her own older circle of artists and writers feel more politically responsible, not less, for finding a way out of the crisis. “There’s definitely a sense of solidarity among people in the arts world and the feeling that politicians are not listening. So it’s almost up to the storytellers to start telling the real stories rather than the stories the politicians are giving us.”
Noughts and Crosses runs at Derby theatre from 1-16 Feb and then tours until 11 May
