a small and quiet light in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre

Dramatist Stephanie Street felt an immediate and powerful connection with Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan (1914-1944), an extraordinarily courageous woman who paid the ultimate price for her heroic fight against fascism.

Now Stephanie wants us to feel the same connection too as her play a small and quiet light opens in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre with Priyanga Burford starring as Noor (August 21-September 12).

Bringing it to the stage has been a long journey, as Stephanie says. The idea began with Priyanga in the first instance.

“We have a wonderful mutual friend who has just directed 45 Years in the Minerva, Prasanna Puwanarajah, and I think he maybe forwarded me a little document from Priyanga, like a little biography of Noor. I had not encountered her before. I read the details and they just really concretely piqued my personal attention.

“Like Noor I am mixed heritage, Indian and white, and there is that sense of a malleable identity, this wanting to resist classification in her, the fact that she shifted across national and linguistic boundaries.

“But the other thing that I found such a big connection with was Paris. My husband is French and I became a mum in Paris and I lived there for five years. I had this relationship with the French language and then I lived there in my mid 30s for five really formative years and that really interested me too.

“So I read more and more, and I discovered about the extraordinariness of the events in Noor's life. In terms of storytelling it's an absolute gift as a story but on a meta level it's a story for theatre that really embraces the possibility of multiplicity. It has been a long, long journey. We started in 2020 and here we are six years later, and when (director) Elin (Schofield) came on board, I realised we were with a quite incredible theatre maker.”

Important for Stephanie is to convey not just a hero but also the complexity behind the hero: “Noor was someone who made so many mistakes and so many misjudgments, not just in the way then she operated as a wireless operator, and I'm really hoping that people will feel a deep connection with her. It is so easy to ‘other’ people like her. The minute you've got a cypher like a different religion or a different colour of skin, it's so easy to place people over there in a box that is for different people. But what I want is an empathy for her, for this woman who was deeply complicated and deeply flawed and so courageous. I want people to feel the connection. I want people to be able to feel this capacity for colossal strength.”

In the piece, it is October 1943. In a small office on the Avenue Foch in Paris, a Gestapo interrogator is questioning a young woman who has been known by many different names: Babuli, Jeanne-Marie, Nora, Madeleine.

As one of the secret agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive – and the first female radio operator to be sent undercover into France – she has evaded capture far longer than most. But now she has been betrayed.

As she faces the fate she has dreaded so long, memories crowd in – a beloved father, a thwarted lover, a gruelling journey to war, and an endless longing for her childhood piano.

Driving her, as Stephanie says, was an inner compulsion: “Look at the times we are living in at the moment. If you feel a political weight and a political pressure, then standing up to the tyrants and the bullies is so important. There is a scene in the play when you see her take that decision. It's something inside her, and that's what I wanted to capture, and I also wanted to capture the role that music plays in her life.

“My father was a lay musician. He was an actuary by profession but like many great mathematicians he played so many instruments and he had about 8,000 or 9,000 LPs. And now that he is no longer here, I think I do understand how fundamental music was to his life and to my life. I think that's what he taught me, part of what he sustained in me. And I think Noor’s internal compulsion came from a moral landscape that she came into the world with.”

As for the decision to stage the piece with an all-female cast: “I have sat in the theatre, particularly in the Minerva, when you are so down and dirty with the stage. It is spectacular to watch actors transform, and there are so many women that we don't know about, particularly on the frontline whose experiences have not been documented, particularly from World War Two. The idea is to make a gesture to that, to the achievements of these women and also to make a gesture towards the transformative capacity of women actors. It's about the fact that anybody can be anything in the way that Noor allowed herself to be so many, many versions of herself.”