A Small and Quiet Light, Orange Tree Theatre
Monday 28th September 2026
One of the great success stories of contemporary theatre is bringing to public attention the hidden histories of British Asians. Examples include Tanika Gupta’s Hedda, with its reference to Hollywood star Merle Oberon’s mixed Anglo-Indian heritage, and The Empress, her epic about Queen Victoria and Indian ayahs, as well as the multi-authored Silence, which featured the memories of British Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs about the trauma of Partition: in these cases, the results have been both ethically right and intellectually stimulating. In this context, the arrival of Stephanie Street’s A Small and Quiet Light at the Orange Tree Theatre is a welcome reminder of the contribution of Asians to the Allied war effort during the second world war.
The docudrama tells the story of Noor Inayat Khan, a British-Indian Special Operations Executive agent (basically a spy) codenamed Madeleine. The first female wireless operator sent into Nazi-occupied France to help the French Resistance, she got there on 17 June 1943, but her network was, however, soon infiltrated by the Germans and its members arrested. Hiding out in Paris, Noor lasted longer than most agents, but was betrayed and captured on 13 October. She resisted interrogation for some six weeks, was transferred to Pforzheim prison in Germany, kept for months in solitary confinement, and finally shot at Dachau concentration camp in September 1944.
Street tells the story, very much a passion project for her, using a fragmented form, which combines Noor’s interrogation in Paris with flashbacks from her extraordinary life: born in Moscow, her father was an Indian Sufi Muslim noble descended from Tipu Sultan and her mother a white American; the family lived in London, then Suresnes near Paris, and Noor studied child psychology at the Sorbonne, then started a career as a children’s author, before the family left for England when the Germans invaded in 1940. The death of her father when she was 13 made her responsible for her younger siblings, while his Sufi teachings encouraged her pacifism.
Clearly, the threat of Nazism meant that Noor had to put aside the more literal pacifism of the time, and she is known to have wanted to contribute to the war effort because this would help raise the status of Indians in the eyes of imperialist and racist Brits. As Street makes clear, the SOE had many doubts about her suitability for work behind enemy lines, noting her child-like qualities and psychological instability (although this was probably exaggerated by racist ideas). The play also shows how her poor sense of security helped the Germans: when she was caught, her notebook, in which she recorded all her secret work, fell into enemy hands. Although she bravely resisted interrogation, this fundamental mistake aided her captors.
Trying to compress this fascinating life into what is basically a two-hour show runs the risk of superficiality, and this is certainly the case with A Small and Quiet Light. So many aspects of Noor’s life, from her father’s spirituality to her involvement with children, from her love of music to her determination to help the war effort, could make a play of their own. Here their inclusion feels rushed. She was killed at age 30, but there is almost nothing in the play about her sexuality, or — equally interesting — lack of physical desire.
Another problem with exemplary lives is that their subjects are just a little too good to be true. Even heroes have faults. Surely. Although Street tries to include some of Noor’s less attractive features, such as her arrogance and stubbornness, the image of the agent remains a bit too perfect, a bit too too heroic for my taste. I think I’d be attracted by a more flawed human. And a bit of research suggests that, despite their racism, the verdicts of some of her commanding officers in SOE training might have not been far off the mark. She wasn’t such a good operative.
Be that as it may, the play’s main recurring episode is Noor’s interrogation by the sharply intellectual Vogt at the Gestapo headquarters on the Avenue Foch in Paris. For me, this is one of the most interesting aspects of her short, and only partially successful, career as a spy; and I really wanted to know more about her interrogator. Her ability to chat amiably and yet not reveal more than her notebooks had already done for six weeks could have made a compelling play. As it is, this is just another fragment of a fragmentary life story. Okay, it conveys the sense that personal bravery and sacrifice at moments of extreme national danger is laudable, but is this enough?
I think not. The most frustrating thing about the production is the lack of both dramatic conflict and the absence of danger, of real stomach-churning fear. Bad things happen, but neither Street nor her director Elin Schofield are able to inject any desperate energy into the storytelling. The decision to cast the play with a female-only company is likewise laudable from the point of view, articulated in the programme notes, of showcasing women’s transformative and shapeshifting capacity, but I suspect the show would actually work better with the presence of a couple of brutish males circling designer Anna Yates’s pit-centred staging.
As it is, this co-production with the Chichester Festival Theatre, where it opened in August, is rather theatre-lite. The main actors, Priyanga Burford as Noor and Caoilfhionn Dunne as Vogt, do a good job, especially Burford’s bravura performance. The rest play the other 14 or so roles: Kiah Arya, Léa Des Garets, Amanda Hadingue, Tripti Tripuraneni and Paksie Vernon. Their diversity gives a sting to some of the racist comments of the time, and they successfully bring out the gentleness of Noor’s upbringing. At the end, there’s a bit of meta-theatre which fiercely stresses the horrible brutality of her death. But then, the show, in keeping with its small and quiet title, draws back into sentimentality. Disappointing.
This review first appeared on The Arts Desk
- A Small and Quiet Light is at the Orange Tree Theatre until 24 October.
