Growing up means learning the world isn’t fair – but Permission, the debut play by playwright Hunia Chawla (check out my recent interview with Hunia) asks what happens when unfairness isn’t just outside you, it’s inside too. What happens when the thing holding you back is the voice you’ve internalised – your father’s, your culture’s, your own?
It’s playing at Tara Theatre, a lovely little venue in Earlsfield, South West London. Somehow, I’d never even heard of it – despite being a theatre journalist with my mum living five minutes down the road. Tara works primarily with South Asian artists and communities, and it deserves far more attention.
Step inside the performance space and the first thing you’ll notice is the set – minimal, just a grey concrete block that looks like two steps. But as the play unfolds, that block becomes everything: a car, a rooftop, an airport queue, a kitchen in a dodgy student house. Nothing much changes visually, yet whole worlds open up through the performances, the sound, and the writing.
The play begins in Karachi. Hanna (Anisa Butt) is in a car with a boy. There’s a knock on the window – a policeman. She quickly tells the boy to act normal, says he’s her brother, tells the officer they’ve been studying chemistry. Then the boy hands over his watch so the policeman doesn’t call her father. Hanna’s freedom comes with conditions – and one of them is her father’s permission. That theme repeats again and again, sometimes spoken aloud, sometimes humming underneath.
We flash back to her childhood: Hanna, five years old, chasing an ice cream van. Her dad’s voice – beautifully pre-recorded by Bhasker Patel – yells out, calling her back inside. ‘There are bad people,’ he says. She’s confused – all she sees is the van. But he’s scared and wants to protect her. It’s a moment that’s tender, funny, and so relatable. Butt’s performance is astonishing: with no costume change, and only a slight lighting shift, she simply becomes a child. You can see the girl and the woman at once.
Hanna’s best friend is Minza (Rea Malhotra Mukhtyar), fierce and grounded, heading to university in Karachi with plans to protest against corruption and patriarchy. Their friendship is playful, loving, and bristling with tension – like all the best ones. There’s a Bollywood parody scene that’s a total joy, but underneath all the fun is a growing tension. Hanna’s off to the UK. Minza is staying behind to study and fight. Their paths are splitting.
In London, Hanna struggles. Her student house is grim, she’s not making friends, and she’s deeply alone. When she meets Anushe – also played by Mukhtyar – a confident, self-assured activist from a British Pakistani background, Hanna latches on. Anushe pushes her to see herself as a victim, and while some of that is valid (there’s a disturbing narrative involving a leaked photo from an ex), it’s clear Hanna’s also using that narrative to avoid the guilt of not calling home. ‘He gave me so much freedom,’ she says. Anushe replies: ‘Freedom is yours. You don’t get given it.’
The contrast between activism in London and activism in Karachi is played sharply and cleverly. Mukhtyar makes both Minza and Anushe utterly distinct – not just in accent and posture, but in energy and belief. Watching Minza face real physical danger while Anushe shouts slogans in safety, forces the audience to ask hard questions about privilege, protest, and what it really costs.
All the while, Hanna doesn’t call her father out of shame for the photo incident. Although for the conversations between Hanna and her ‘Abba’, he is pre-recorded, they feel astonishingly real – a testament to both Patel’s warmth and Butt’s deeply reactive performance. He just wants her to be safe. She’s scared of letting him down. There are moments between them that are genuinely moving. Being a father of two girls, I cried. It was that simple, that earned.
Writer Hunia Chawla, in her debut play, brings something special. The writing is crisp, smart, and full of feeling. You can see the poet in her, but also the playwright who understands stage dynamics, stakes, and silence. She lets her characters be complicated, and never lets the audience off the hook.
Permission asks big questions: What does freedom really mean? Who gets to feel safe? What happens when liberation is conditional? But it does all of this through a personal story that feels intimate and emotionally honest. This is one of those rare plays where the political and the personal are one and the same.
Minimal staging. Maximal impact. See it if you can.
Permission is playing at Tara Theatre until 7th June 2025, so hurry and buy your tickets from taratheatre.com now.
Words by Nick Barr
Photography Adam Razvi
