Guest Post: 'I Hope Audiences Feel Deeply For Noor': Writer Stephanie Street On A SMALL AND QUIET LIGHT

Writer Stephanie Street's a small and quiet light is based on the life of Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan (1914-1944), an extraordinarily courageous woman who paid the ultimate price for her heroic fight against fascism during the Second World War. Here Street explores how she brought Noor's amazing story to life.

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When I first discovered Noor and her incredible life, I knew immediately that here was a perfect story for theatre. Noor, like an actor on a stage, shape-shifted constantly and pushed beyond the edges of her human limits. Not only would this be a wonderful, epic female leading role, to rival the scale and scope of the male greats like Lear or Willy Loman, I realised that this play could challenge ideas of what women, particularly women during the Second World War, and even more particularly, women of colour at that time, ‘could be’. 

When I considered the legacy of World War Two in film and theatre, I was struck that, aside from a small number (including David Hare’s Plenty or Kali Theatre’s own play about Noor back in 2023), most focus on men on the front line. When we do hear about women in this period of history, it’s mainly on the home front.

In reality, there were so many women engaged in active service, particularly towards the end of the war, when Britain needed to reinforce the Allies’ resistance in occupied Europe. To this end, Churchill created the Special Operations Executive, helped by recruiting Captain Selwyn Jepson. I have borrowed Jepson’s actual words in my play when he engages Noor: “Your sex has far greater capacity for cool, lonely courage. Men need steadying and shoring up from a mate;  you women not so much”. This was an extraordinary first for women - to be tasked with doing more than men could!

There have been many excellent documentaries and biographies about Noor over the years, highlighting the phenomenal events of her life and time in service with the SOE. I did a lot of initial research using these as well as source material from the war archives; but from the start I knew I wanted to make something more than a docu-drama.

So we made an early commitment to take our audiences on a journey of the imagination. Theatre’s magic comes from the suspension of disbelief. Since the origin of theatre in Greece, audiences have been carried on journeys of imagination that take them beyond the literal - in Shakespeare’s time, believing a man ‘is’ Rosalind or, more recently, believing that a huge puppet ‘is’ Joey, the war horse. For me, the collaborative, inter-connected act of a piece of theatre in front of an audience is its capacity to generate profound empathy. And by investing one’s imagination fully, I believe that empathetic bond between characters and audience is even stronger.

We have a cast of seven extraordinary female actors playing multiple roles; and what makes that so rich is that we're seeing the actors’ maximum transformative capacity. So as we are putting a lens on this woman, Noor, living through the extremest circumstances, with all the shapeshifting that she needed to do, to have that narrative played out in what The Acting Company are doing, was really captivating to me and the whole creative team.

a small and quiet light sits in a long line of plays and films about World War Two. It was a foundational moment in British and European history and now, perhaps more than ever, we need to be remembering the lessons we learned at that time. I don’t think, however, that it’s theatre’s place to teach or deliver answers - the plays that have touched and affected me most have been those that have opened my eyes and heart to new possibilities, that made me ask myself big, hard questions afterwards.

I hope the audiences at the Orange Tree feel deeply for Noor, go away wanting to discover more about her and the other extraordinary women fought, often with their lives, for the freedom we enjoy today.

a small and quiet light runs at the Orange Tree Theatre until 21 October