Copy: The National, August 2012
>>I hadn’t been back to the Edinburgh Festival since the days of covering it for Metro. What had changed? Well, The Assembly Rooms now appears to have a Jamie Oliver restaurant on the ground floor, and the rest of the building has been completely refurbished. There is another Assembly venue somewhere else, somewhat controversially. But the spirit of the Fringe remained in the Assembly Rooms in some form: the room in which Sarfraz Manzoor was doing his show had terrible sight lines unless you were in the front three rows.
I was there to speak to Manzoor and see his show for The National – in his words he’s “from Luton, a Springsteen fan and a Muslim” – and the general crux of this hugely likeable hour with the journalist and writer was how he has tended to follow his life based on the tenets of Bruce Springsteen. He’s being both serious and tongue in cheek – what Manzoor is really saying is that, when he’s needed The Boss, he’s been there for him. Especially when he was growing up in Luton and, as the last lines of Thunder Road suggest, it’s time to get out.
Manzoor’s story as the son of a Pakistani immigrant has been told in both book form – Greetings From Bury Park – and in an incredibly moving piece in The Guardian and Granta, when he described the reaction within his family when he decided to marry a white woman. The show is based on all those experiences, and he’s rather keen – perhaps too keen – to explain it’s not stand-up. Naturally, he feels the need to entertain but actually the show is at it’s weakest when he’s shoehorning in a few one-liners. The material is compelling and Manzoor likeable enough that he doesn’t need to fall back on out and out jokes.
Perhaps the confidence from completing the run at Edinburgh will mean that when the UK tour kicks off in the autumn (and happily there’s more than one East Anglian date for my regional followers) he can simply concentrate on presenting a wonderfully warm exploration of his faith, fatherhood and family. In the meantime, it’s made me go back to Bruce Springsteen all over again.
