★★★★★
Sanjay Lago creates the perfect environment for his hour of poetry, comedy and story. He’s immediately engaging, his natural and authentic personality, with a brain ‘as busy as a London Underground Map’ is warming. He delights in his telling of tales. The audience are enraptured by the way he recreates his coming out story or his disastrous first dates. Lago never allows himself to be concerned with the constraints us neurodivergent people are told repeatedly we should adhere to, he allows himself to go off on tangents, to be expressive, quick-witted, say the unsayable. The vision he has for this Gaysian Glaswegian experience, is expansive, referring to what it will look like with a huge budget, belying his acting roots, but undercut with a self-deprecating humour.
I loved the way Sanjay conjured up his family members, embodying them, showing those splits of identity. For all his lightness of touch and camp humour, there are moments of profound seriousness. The experiences of racism and homophobia are hard to hear from a privileged perspective, and he distils this in his poetry, which has real impact.
The Bollywood song translations into English was perhaps my favourite part, a set piece that perfectly illustrated all the themes Sanjay covered throughout the hour.
It’s ironic that as an hour, it’s a blueprint for a larger show, but as it stands now, it’s brilliantly realised. Sanjay Lago is a born raconteur, and I hope he doesn’t lose that unpolished, off-the-cuff brilliance when the show premieres in the West-End.
Love Me Like a Chai Tea Latte is on at Lighthouse Books on the 20th August
