The benefit of period pieces is that they are resistant, if not entirely immune, to the vagaries of fashion. They also might take on the politics and conversations of the day, providing a new prism through which to view the world.
It is a decade since the premiere of Tanika Gupta’s The Empress, a story stretching over a 13-year-period from Queen Victoria’s jubilee year of 1887, following a group of travellers arriving in Britain from India. A tale of people travelling across oceans to build a new life in the UK, only to be met with hostility and exploitation, has surely grown more relevant in the intervening decade.
