A new version of acclaimed comedy-drama Happy Birthday Sunita shows at Warwick Arts Centre this month. The play tells the story of one Punjabi household, but the complicated dynamics at its heart are something that everyone with a family will understand - as its writer, Harvey Virdi, tells What’s On...

If you’re the sort of person who’s always in the kitchen at parties, then Rifco Theatre Company’s family comedy-drama, Happy Birthday Sunita, could be right up your (g)alley. Much of the play takes place between the sink and cooker of the Johal residence, where daughter Sunita’s 40th birthday party is the catalyst for a wild night of revelations, realisations, recriminations and ramifications, albeit with a hearty helping of food, fun and frolics along the way.

A sell-out success on its first outing in 2014, the play is being revived by the same team that created the original, but with a new cast and revised script by actress and writer Harvey Virdi. Harvey has starred in a number of films, including Bend It Like Beckham, but is probably best known as Dr Misbah Maalik in Channel Four soap Hollyoaks. The play will be directed by Pravesh Kumar MBE, founder & artistic director of Rifco, which has a stated remit to develop vibrant and accessible new plays and musicals that reflect and celebrate British South Asian experiences. Happy Birthday Sunita ticks all of those boxes, and while it might no longer be new, the script has undergone some major revisions that not only freshen it up but make it even better, according to Harvey.
“When Pravesh spoke to me last year and said he’d like to bring it back and have another go at it, I thought that’d be brilliant,” she says. “Since then we’ve had Brexit and Covid, and they’ve really affected people and how they think about what they want to do with their lives.”
Harvey admits she also jumped at the chance to tweak some of those things she wasn’t totally happy with first time around.
“It’s just trying to do it better, because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? I’m not saying it wasn’t good last time, because I was so happy with it, but it’s always nice to have another go.”

She also believes that a finished script is never set in stone, because it becomes a living thing for the cast to potentially tinker with and reinterpret at every performance. 
“The wonderful thing about theatre is that every night it’s going to be different because the reaction from the audience is different. Sometimes they laugh at bits you didn’t expect people to laugh at, or the reaction is different, and that affects how you play it as the actor. That’s the joy for me.”

Commitments to her day job on Hollyoaks mean Harvey won’t be performing - she missed out first time round too while touring another project - but she’s happy to have spent time in the rehearsal room seeing it taking shape, and is hugely excited by the new cast.
“They’re completely different [to the original cast] but equally amazing. Individual actors bring their own interpretation to a piece, and it’s wonderful watching actors bring a character to life. Sometimes in my head I can hear the rhythm of how I envisaged the scene going, and then when it happens you think ‘Yes! Yes!’”

As well as becoming the characters she envisioned, Harvey knows that actors in a touring company invariably become like a family, developing bonds that can spill over into their performances.
“It’s funny how that happens because it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing, as soon as a little company comes together you become a family for the length of that show. It might just be a few weeks or a year’s tour, but it’s joyous.”

She also delights in bringing characters we all grew up with - “aunties and uncles that are part of your life” - to the stage. “You grow up observing them and their characteristics, and they’re all people we recognise, but we don’t get to see them on TV or on stage that often.”

The characters in the play might be based on an amalgamation of her own ‘aunties’ (a generic term for older women connected to her family) and grandmas, according to Harvey, but she’s confident no one will see themselves on the stage. But even if they do, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the play features three especially strong female leads, all at potential turning points in their lives.
“There’s a mother, a daughter-in-law and Sunita, whose birthday it is. All three women are at different stages in their lives, trying to work out or discover who they are, what they’ve done with their lives and what they’re going to do with their lives.”

The birthday party sees a variety of long-hidden truths and feelings come to a head, and even though the characters and story might be fictional, Harvey genuinely, and adorably, gets infuriated just talking about them.
“They’ve just avoided talking about the one thing they all should’ve bloody talked about 20 years ago,” she says with more than an air of consternation. “And the longer you avoid it, the more … urrgghh [makes noise of acute exasperation] it becomes.”

All those elements remain at the heart of the revised version of the drama, but as well as feeding in a number of contemporary references - Brexit, Covid, etc - Harvey’s been able to flesh out some of the characters by extending the show. Formerly a one-act play, it’s now two acts with an interval.
“Having two acts gives us time to explore the characters a bit more and find out why they are the way they are and what they’ve experienced to get to this point in their lives. It’s been nice to have the space to explore that.”

And while those experiences might be specific to the Johal family, the story is very much a universal one. Harvey is keen for the play not to be pigeonholed as an Asian family drama but rather just a family drama. 
“The family might happen to be Punjabi but they could be anybody. For me, the story is really important because it’s about three women who are standing up and saying, this is how I want to live my life, and I’m not going to do what you want me to do. 
“It’s scary for anyone to do that, and say ‘I’m going to live my life like this’, because the repercussions can be huge. It takes a lot of bravery. 
“And that’s all of us, isn’t it? We’re all brought up with a certain way to behave and live our lives, and it takes a brave person to do something different and outside the family or community.
“In a way it’s got nothing to do with being Indian - it’s about all of us.”

by Steve Adams