Review: Flowers, Stars and Conquerors, Hope Theatre

Flowers, Stars and Conquerors is a fascinating cultural study of the changing societal pressures on Bengali women, playing at the Hope Theatre

“Conversations about family history are always…heated”

Nusrath Tapadar’s debut play Flowers, Stars and Conquerors forms part of the Hope Theatre’s Write Club Festival 2025 and as a deeply personal piece performed solo by Tapadar, emerges as an audacious piece of theatre. Delving into personal testimony as a queer Bengali woman, she also reaches back through the generations to explore the complementary and contrasting experiences of her mother and grandmother

Tapadar explores these stories in a fragmented, non-linear fashion. First ricocheting around different points in her childhood, she gradually builds up a picture of the extended family connections and unchanging cultural rituals that form many a traditional Bengali community. There’s comfort in the closeness that provides but also a sense of overwhelming pressure, particularly for those who find they don’t necessarily conform.

But as she probes into some of the murkier details about family stories that aren’t ever quite fully told, she discovers that even the most traditional of faces can conceal hidden depths. The revelation that her grandmother was a rifle-shooting champion back in Bangladesh with hopes of getting to the Olympics is set against the realities of being the only woman in that position, bearing an intense weight of societal expectation.

Similarly, examining her own mother’s journey through dealing with the pressures of cleaving to tradition versus seeking a more personal path to fulfilment points up nuances not always considered a generation away. And after embracing her queerness, there’s real pathos in Tapadar surveying her relationships, both to her family and to her culture at large, fully acknowledging the difficulties in coming out when acceptance isn’t guaranteed.

Alena Sahota’s production could perhaps usefully find ways to help Tapadar more clearly delineate the multiple characters she inhabits, it not always being entirely clear which generation we were in. But Tapadar is a hugely charismatic performer (“Does this look like a face that would provoke anyone?”) and this is a bold and characterful play that both respects and reckons with the immensity of its cultural baggage, an engagingly personal journey that speaks to us all.

Running time: 70 minutes (without interval)
Flowers, Stars and Conquerors is booking at the Hope Theatre until 22nd January

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