A Day Out at Happy Birthday Sunita at the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch

[Ad- gifted experience] We have visited the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch several times as it’s one of our favorites! The venue has a lovely cafe and a bar, as well as a stage for taking pictures and a little reading library at the back. It’s a lovely theatre that we are always excited to return too. This time, we went to see Happy Birthday Sunita – a play about an indian family, their dynamics, and Sunita turning 30 years old.

Happy Birthday Sunita is a comedy about a fragmented family learning each other’s little secrets and growing together, due to this big event. Sunita is a quite, homebody type person who seems to always be quite miserable. She still lives at home, she didn’t go off to university even though she wanted too, and now it’s her 30th birthday. Her younger brother, who does come for her birthday, went to university and is married to a women who wants to be liked badly and is trying to work in fashion. Their mother, the other main character, has been single for years and years after their father left them, and hasn’t changed much in that time, but at this party her children are noticing small changes in her.

Most of this scene takes place in their home, with Sunita coming home from work and hiding in her room, then her mother coming in to get the kitchen set up before the brother and wife arrive. This performance was in English, but there were phrases in another language, which from the wife, were drawn out, clearly something she’s not use to speaking, and according to the person sat behind me, had the wrong gender attached to them, causing a lot of people to laugh out loud. Happy Birthday Sunita was hilarious, not only in this language running joke, but in a lot of other moments in the play, which did have the audience laughing in their seats.

In the play, you kind of learn about the families problems. The brother is upset at his wife for not having children yet, so they are bickering about that and the fact that the brother always visits the mother for dinner instead of coming home for it. Sunita is upset that people think she’s always grumpy, but really she just wants to wait for her dad to call. He never calls, but she is convinced he will come for her birthday despite previously never visiting. And their mother has a new, English boyfriend who she had not told the family about.

At the end of Happy Birthday Sunita, they work through these problems as well as talk about the expectations the mother had growing up – she had an arranged marriage, their father loved someone in India, she then forced a lot of the culture that she had growing up onto her daughter, which didn’t allow her to go to university. The brother wants a child because that’s what’s expected of their culture, but his wife doesn’t want to have babies and put her body through that, and the expectation was set before they were married. Sunita realizes she’s sad because she has been waiting around for her whole life, for her dad to come back, and he is just not coming back. At the end of the play, there is a lot of self discovery.

We really enjoyed Happy Birthday Sunita. The play had lots of joyous, family moments coupled with a few serious problems and topics to work through. It showed aspects of Indian culture that I was not aware of, and all of the performers did an amazing job in capturing the spirit of the play.

You can check out our other Days Out to see what else we’ve been up too!