After seeing how moved gay men were by The Inheritance, the playwright wanted to write something that would strike a chord with women – so came up with The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs
A group of women are singing along to My Favourite Things, the old favourite from The Sound of Music, except the original words have been switched with lesbian-specific lyrics. “Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings” becomes instead “the soft brush of pubic hair on my chin”. This is the raucous rehearsal for The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs, Iman Qureshi’s new play about a queer choir and the struggle for harmony within it.
The drama came about after Qureshi saw The Inheritance, Matthew Lopez’s epic inspired by EM Forster’s Howards End. “I watched an auditorium full of gay men wipe their damp eyes and hold hands in the dark,” she says. “That theatre is a kind of communal healing.” She saw the same thing at Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and felt an ache, realising she had never seen anything that gave a similar space to lesbian stories on stage: “I don’t think queer women have been given enough opportunities to sit in a dark room together holding hands, acknowledging those old wounds, and hearing their stories told. Hearing that they matter.”
