February 15, 2019
British-Iranian comedienne Shappi Khorsandi has launched a new stand-up comedy routine called “Mistress and Misfit” in which she plays the role of Lady Hamilton, the woman who rose from poverty to become Lord Nelson’s lover.
Despite her Persian background, Khorsandi sees a lot of similarities between herself and Lady Hamilton.
“She was a life model, I was a life model,” Khorsandi told The Herald of Scotland. “She was a cleaner, I was a cleaner. She was a single mum, I was a single mum. She modeled for George Romney, the great artist of the day, I modeled for GCSE [high school] students.”
Even the show’s title – although it refers to Lady Hamilton – is quite fitting to Khorsandi. “Including the mistress thing,” she explains. “I went out with someone for eight months and found out later that I’d been his mistress, not his girlfriend.”
Khorsandi, 45, who is rarely shy about sharing personal details, describes how she first discovered this just before she went on a radio show. “The presenter said to me, ‘You went out with so-and-so.’ I said, ‘Yeah I did.’ And she said, ‘So did I’.”
Khorsandi checked the calendar and realized that when she’d been dating the man, he must actually have been with this other woman at the same time. “I said, ‘Oh … That’s so strange. When I had just had my baby, he targeted me. He moved fast, romanced me. At one point I said to him, ‘You’ve got a girlfriend haven’t you?’ Because I couldn’t understand why he was so on-off, hot-cold.’ And she said, ‘Yes, he was with me.’”
Khorsandi, 44, says it’s “all water under the bridge now.” Everything she says suggests she doesn’t give a hoot about the men it didn’t work out with. With two young children to look after – Cassius, 10, and Genevieve, 4 – both from separate previous relationships, she isn’t really on the lookout for a new man either. She is also on admirably good terms with Cassius’s father, fellow comic Christian Reilly. Recently she tweeted a picture of herself with his fiancee, and the words: “Girls’ night in with my ex-husband’s fiancee. I love this woman. She’s an asset to mine and my children’s lives.”
“That situation didn’t come easily,” she admits. “We didn’t pull that out of a hat. He and I were, I would say, at war for a few years. We put each other through terrible torment.” And for quite a few years, Khorsandi’s divorce was a prominent focus for her comedy repertoire, and her red-hot anger. “Then,” she said, “when he met his fiancee and I knew her already – she’s Scottish, from Edinburgh and I’ve known her for a long time – and he told me he was going out with her, I actually did a little, Yes! I thought, I know her, she’s kind, intelligent, warm and she gets it.”
“They live just around the corner from us,” she adds. “My kids adore her and what more can you ask for?” Key to this working, she says, is the fact that she and Reilly no longer have any “emotional anxiety” between them. Talking to him recently about being a single parent, she mentioned when she broke up with her “husband,” almost as if she had forgotten that he had been that husband.
Khorsandi first started to research Lady Hamilton with a view to writing a book about her. “But it was just too hard. Books are so time-consuming. And it’s too lonely.” So, instead, she decided to incorporate Lady Hamilton into a show, and use her as a way of comparing the lives of lower social class women from the Georgian period to those of today. What upset her most was the way Emma Hamilton’s life ended. “In his will, Nelson asked for her to be looked after financially in the event of his death. But the state didn’t honor it. They put her in a debtor’s prison. Then she fled and she died a refugee and an alcoholic in Calais” in 1815.
One of the chief differences between Lady Hamilton’s era and today, she says, is that it’s now possible for women to be financially independent – back then many were entirely dependent on men. As ever, Khorsandi manages to put this difference in an entertaining way. “I live in a world where I have the luxury of going out with skint men. Every boyfriend I have had has been skint.” Skint is a British term for impoverished.
This belief in financial independence for women was instilled in her by her Iranian parents. Her father, Hadi Khorsandi, a satirist who was initially supportive of the revolution, had to leave when things became too dangerous after he made a joke that suggested the regime’s fanaticism had gone too far. “My parents came from a background where women were absolutely dependent on brothers and fathers,” she says. “And they didn’t want that for me. They didn’t move to England to have that for me.”
In fact, her parents were “quite devastated” when she told them she was getting married. “They didn’t understand why that had to happen before I had children – I was a lot more old-fashioned than they were.”
But even if she didn’t then take their view on marriage, she has always guarded her financial independence and the freedom that gave her. This meant she had options even when she was pregnant with her second child and her boyfriend “rejected the situation,” as she puts it. Because she lived “in this time and had the resources” she was able to keep her daughter, Genevieve. She contrasts this with Emma Hamilton. “She had a baby with Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh and he didn’t support her, so she was forced to foster her baby out, then spent the rest of her life missing that child.”
Khorsandi doesn’t have to look far back in her own family to see women who were forced to give up their children. “My great grandmother was forced to marry at an incredibly young age and, in order to get separated from her husband, she had to give up her children, because the law in Iran gives custody to the men immediately.”
Like Lady Hamilton, Khor-sandi considers herself a misfit. Part of that relates to coming from a family who fled Iran. Her memoir, “A Beginner’s Guide To Acting English,” describes the strangeness of arriving in England as immigrants, as well as the fear of the regime that still pursued the family, the constant checking under cars for bombs.
Khorsandi quickly gets down to the nitty gritty, the very personal, and will talk, for instance, about coming out as bisexual and how she admires the way young people today talk about sexuality. She recalls how difficult it was to be bisexual when she was young. She recently wrote that, although she was bisexual and had marched for Pride since she was 17, she’d never come out as such.
“Even within the gay community, they would mock me; call me a lipstick lesbian,” she says now. “My gay friends thought it was hilarious and that I was dabbling. So I played up to that. But actually, no, it really upset me when I really liked a girl and she laughed at me.”
She also describes how, even before #MeToo reshaped consciousness, she called out a groping incident which occurred when she appeared at a charity event. “I remember this man touched my arse. And I thought, ‘Oh I can’t ignore this.’ When I got home I was shaking and so upset.” She complained about it on Twitter. “And then,” she recalls, “all this happened with Weinstein a few days later, and I thought – yeah, this shouldn’t be tolerated. Because, when you touch anyone on their body, you don’t know what you’re triggering. You don’t know my life experiences. You don’t know how I’m going to react if you touch my arse or my tits. You don’t know what that’s going to do to me. You’re lucky all it was was a tweet, because the anger I felt…. If I had been drunk, it might have been a much bigger scene at the actual event. Perhaps it should have been.”