Lunch Box at the Fringe: Lubna Kerr on Bullying, Belonging and Building Bridges
By Nina Purton
In the UK today, the overlap between poverty, race and bullying is impossible to ignore. Research shows that in recent years, 65% of Bangladeshi and 59% of Pakistani children are living in poverty. That’s already a heavy weight to carry. Add to that the classroom dynamic, where kids from the lowest-income households are around 20% more likely to be bullied than their wealthier peers, and you start to see how layered the struggle really is. Poverty can make a child stand out. But so can skin colour, language, religion, or simply not fitting in.
With marginalisation happening at so many levels, the real question is: how do we create a more inclusive outlook on life’s hardships, especially in the cultural ‘melting pot’ that globalisation has stirred up?
That’s exactly what Scottish-Pakistani Muslim artist Lubna Kerr is exploring in her new play Lunch Box, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.
From Pharmacy to the Stage
Lubna’s story doesn’t begin on stage. It starts with a scholarship. Her father left Pakistan in the 1960s to do a PhD in chemistry at Strathclyde University, and brought the family with him. Both parents were academics, but also liberal, encouraging her to try everything from sports to drama. Still, the unspoken pressure so many children face, especially those coming from minority backgrounds, was clear: their sacrifices should be lived up to.
“Can I do these things? I didn’t even ask them to be honest because they’d sacrificed so much of their life for me,” She tells me in our interview at Pleasance Courtyard in Edinburgh. We sat just beside the kids’ tent, a little sanctuary adorned with small tables and chairs, drawing pencils and traces of small artistic hands at work, as if a reminder of that creative drive to create we all experience at some point in our childhood.
Lubna followed the academic route. She studied pharmacy, got her PhD, and built a career specialising in diabetes. It wasn’t until her marriage ended in 2010 that she finally allowed herself to revisit those childhood dreams. With grown-up children and a new sense of freedom, she retrained as an actor. Comedy came first, then one-woman shows with up to eight characters.
By 2019 she was at the Fringe with her comedy show Where Are You Really Really From? — Lockdown could have slowed her down, but she found ways to perform online to audiences as far away as South Africa and Japan. Still, she wanted to keep creating. That drive turned into TickBox, her first funded play, a piecing blending drama with comedy to depict her mother’s racial experience in the UK.
Her second play was called Chatterbox performed at Pleasance in 2024
“It’s about being called stupid by a primary school teacher because I couldn’t speak any English at the time.”
She performed TickBox and its updated version Tickbox 2 for three years, earning a four-star review from All Edinburgh Theatre and a nomination for the Filipa Braganca Award.
Lunch Box – Her Latest Work
Lunch Box adds yet another dimension to Lubna’s storytelling. This time, Lubna shifts the focus away from herself and her immediate circle to look at discrimination from a wider angle. She wants to understand what makes someone a bully.
“People are not born bullies, they are made, and I think people write them off too quickly.”
“I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me,” she’s quick to add, ‘I’m a survivor. I wanted people to know you can survive being bullied and there is so much you can learn from those experiences. I wanted to show the life of a bully and what happened behinds closed doors”
On stage, she floats between characters — the rough Glaswegian bully, her disciplined but caring father, her artistic drama teacher. Each impersonation slides into the next, weaving together a story where the audience can see how little Lubna and her bully knew about each other’s overlapping private battles: belonging, family expectations, the awkward fit of integration at school.
One of the things that struck me the most is when she catches herself in her own prejudice. She recalls judging her bully: “he’s rotten to the core! Sorry Allah, he is a human not an apple!” The line gets a laugh, but it lands with meaning. Humour makes space for honesty — showing how human it is to judge, while also pointing to empathy, love, and faith as tools for healing.
“Our stories are their stories. Bullying happens in every culture, in every religion and every race, every community. It’s not any different and people are marginalised at all ages, at all stages of their lives. We have more in common than we have differences.”
She pauses, then adds: “I want to be the bridge for bringing both sets of people together.”
The play is full of moments like that — little nudges to re-examine what we think is normal. Why do we so easily call a shop run by Asians a “corner shop” while the same thing run by a white Brit becomes a grocery store? Why is an Asian person in Britain called an immigrant but when British people go to Dubai, they are called expats?
We’ve come a long way since the 60s, especially in cities like London or Glasgow. But as Lubna reminds us, microaggressions are still there — subtle, everyday, and worth paying attention to.
Bridging Through Accessibility
Lubna’s commitment doesn’t stop at the script. She’s determined to make her art accessible — to truly bring everyone into the room.
She’s made steps by collaborating with blind Pakistani artist Kirin Saeed from VICS (Visually Impaired Creators Scotland) to explore how her shows could open up to audiences who are blind or partially sighted.
For each Fringe run, Lubna hosts a “touch tour” before one of her shows. Guests who are blind or visually impaired are invited on stage an hour before the performance. With care, Lubna tells me she invites her guest into this tour by asking, “Can I take your hand and show you where the characters would stand?” That physical introduction gave them a feel for the world they’d later hear come alive.
The sensorial walk-through included multiple elements like the spots where each character is impersonated, how they hold themselves there, an introduction to the smooth surface of her drama teacher’s cherished vase, and more. Each prop told a story, and by the time the audience sat down to listen later, they had already built a world in their imaginations.
To extend that experience, she recorded a pre-show introduction — describing not just the characters, but their voices, their homes, even the atmosphere they carried with them. That way, people arrived with a sense of place before a single line was spoken.
This year, like last year, she had a BSL interpreter on August 14 and new this year was captioning on the 18th, making Lunch Box accessible not only for those who read sign language but also for deaf audiences who rely on text. The only missing piece, she admits with a sigh, is live audio description, which small venues make tricky to pull off.
“I am really really keen that art should be for everybody and there should be no barriers that we can’t overcome. That includes race, culture and language, and discrimination, as well as the physical aspects of it.”
It’s a reminder that accessibility isn’t a box to tick. It’s a creative act in itself, one that asks artists to step out of their own habits and imagine how others might enter the story. And in that sense, accessibility becomes part of Lubna’s larger mission: to bridge divides, dissolve barriers, and remind us that everyone belongs in the theatre.
Walking Away
As someone ethnically and racially differentiated, raised by a black woman and immigrant in the country I was born in, this play touched me at many different levels. But I’ll do my best to keep to the core of the apple in this conclusion without getting too deep into my own biases — a lesson learned from teenage Lubna!
What struck me most about Lunch Box is how Lubna leads by example. Instead of staying in the role of the victim, she takes a step sideways, trying to see the world through her bully’s eyes. The message is simple, but it sticks: people who cause suffering are often carrying suffering of their own. Poverty, family expectations, racism, social isolation — these are pressures almost all of us encounter at some point.
She reminds us that kindness isn’t passive. It takes effort. You have to get close enough to really know someone — even those who once hurt you. And in doing so, you may just find yourself part of the bridge she’s building.
Want to find out more about Lubna? Check out her website, you can also find her on Instagram, Twitter/X, Facebook, and occasionally on TickTock.
About the Author
As a sustainability, innovative materials and well-being writer, Nina Purton is an avid investigator of all things circular. She is set on researching behavioural patterns, pioneering materials and initiatives that are revolutionising the way we produce, consume, and relate to other human beings and the natural environment.
You can find out more about her on her LinkedIn profile and website.