Inside the immersive theatre telling London's migration stories
Aisha Begum stands in a converted curry house on Brick Lane, east London, rehearsing a scene where the audience will sit at formica tables while a Bangladeshi woman recounts her arrival at Heathrow in 1979. The former restaurant, with its mint green tiles and worn menus pinned to the wall, has become the unlikely stage for her latest production, "Curry Mile," a sensory journey through three generations of migration to the Bangladeshi communities of Tower Hamlets.
Begum is part of a wave of London-based directors using immersive and site-specific theatre to excavate the lived realities of immigrant communities often relegated to statistics. Alongside established names like Punchdrunk and other immersive outfits, she has carved out a practice rooted in oral history, intimate venues, and a refusal of the proscenium arch. Her work asks audiences to do more than watch; it asks them to walk through the rooms where migration actually happened.
The resonance of her practice reaches well beyond the UK. In Sydney's western suburbs, from Lakemba to Cabramatta, and across Melbourne's Footscray and Springvale, similar stories are staged by theatre-makers responding to their own post-migrant communities. Australian audiences have long engaged with work about diaspora, and Begum's methods speak directly to that tradition of cultural self-representation.
From Whitechapel to the world stage
Begum grew up in a one-bedroom flat above a shop on Brick Lane, the granddaughter of jute factory workers who arrived from Sylhet in the 1960s. Her early training came at the Royal Court, where she noticed that the stories she brought to the writing room were routinely softened, made palatable for a theatre-going public assumed to be white and middle-class. She left to found her own company, Kali Theatre Projects, in 2014.
Her first major production, "Letters from the Lane," transformed a derelict textile warehouse into a series of small rooms where audience members listened to recorded testimonies from elderly Bangladeshi residents. The show travelled to the Sydney Festival in 2022 and was restaged in Melbourne's Footscray in collaboration with Polyglot Theatre. Critics in both cities noted how the work's refusal of the fourth wall made the stories feel urgent rather than archival.
The mechanics of immersion
The grammar of Begum's work borrows from Secret Cinema and Punchdrunk, but the political intent is different. Where commercial immersive theatre often trades in spectacle and brand tie-ins, her productions treat immersion as an ethical act. Audiences are given headphones and asked to follow a character into domestic spaces, kitchens, prayer rooms, and back gardens. They smell the cardamom, hear children's homework being supervised, and stand witness to conversations that rarely reach a stage.
She works with ethnographers and oral historians as dramaturgs, and the scripts are only completed after months of community workshops. The result is theatre that feels researched rather than imagined. A scene in "Curry Mile" was rewritten seventeen times after focus groups in Tower Hamlets objected to a portrayal of arranged marriage that felt reductive to the setting.
| Aspect | Traditional proscenium theatre | Begum's immersive productions |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Fixed stage, auditorium | Converted homes, shops, community halls |
| Storytelling | Linear, scripted scenes | Branching paths, audience-driven |
| Community involvement | Occasionally consulted | Central to every stage of development |
| Audience role | Spectator | Participant and witness |
Echoes in Australian multicultural cities
Australian audiences will recognise the parallels. Western Sydney has long been a laboratory for place-based storytelling, with companies like Urban Theatre Projects and Belvoir St Theatre shaping work that emerges from specific suburbs rather than arriving in them fully formed. Melbourne has Polyglot Theatre and Arena Theatre doing similar work in Footscray and beyond. The Australian arts funding bodies, including the Australia Council, Create NSW, and Creative Victoria, have historically supported this kind of community-led practice.
She is currently in discussions with the Sydney Festival about bringing "Curry Mile" to Carriageworks in 2026, a venue in Eveleigh that has hosted its own share of post-migrant storytelling. Several of her collaborators have spent residencies in Sydney and Melbourne, building bridges between the two scenes.
Funding the unseen
Immersive theatre is expensive and risky. Where a touring play can perform to hundreds a night in a single venue, an immersive piece often caps audiences at a fraction of that number to preserve the intimacy of the experience. Begum has spent years assembling a patchwork of support: grants from Arts Council England, private philanthropy, ticket revenue, and increasingly from international partners.
In Australia, the funding landscape is different. The Australia Council's grants programme and state-level bodies like Create NSW and Creative Victoria have been more receptive to community-led immersive work, partly because multicultural policy has framed such work as social cohesion infrastructure. The economics remain tight, and she has spoken frankly about the precarity of working with communities that are themselves often asked to contribute labour for free.
The craft of authentic performance
Begum casts non-professional actors alongside professionals, a method shared by Shopfront Theatre in Sydney and Arena Theatre in Melbourne. Her performers include former garment workers, imams, and hairdressers who have never set foot on a stage before.
Key elements shaping her productions:
- Authentic domestic spaces borrowed from local residents
- Multilingual scenes with surtitles rather than translation
- Soundscapes built from field recordings of the actual neighbourhood
- A closing ritual where audiences share food with the cast
She is meticulous about who tells which story. A scene about the Bengali garment workers' wildcat strikes of the 1970s was not performed by professional actors but by the daughters and granddaughters of the women who took part.
Productions in the pipeline
Begum has three projects in development for 2025 and 2026, each rooted in a specific London community.
Upcoming productions include:
- "Elephant," a piece about the Somali community in Elephant and Castle
- "Hackney Nights," a collaboration with a Kurdish collective in Hackney
- "Auburn to Aldgate," an exchange with Urban Theatre Projects exploring the Tamil communities of western Sydney and the Tamil diaspora in East London
The third project is her most Australian-facing yet, and reflects years of cross-pollination between the two scenes. In a London theatre ecology still dominated by a narrow range of accents and stories, her practice insists that the city is made, nightly, by the people who arrive and stay.
Visit Kali Theatre Projects online to follow tour dates, or catch "Letters from the Lane" at a community centre near you when it next travels to Australia.