Theatre review: The Boy With Two Hearts

Phil Porter's The Boy With Two Hearts transfers to the Dorfman after originating last year at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff - appropriately enough, as that's the city where Hamed & Hessam Amiri, authors of the memoir Porter's play adapts, and their family made their home. But not before a rough journey: Beginning in 2000 in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are at their strongest, Hamed (Farshid Rokey) and Hessam's (Shamail Ali) mother Fariba (Houda Echouafni) speaks out publicly against the regime's treatment of women. She expects repercussions but doesn't realise they'll be so quick or so brutal: Within hours the local Taliban has sentenced her to death, and when husband Mohammed (Dana Haqjoo) refuses to give up her whereabouts he's lucky to escape with his life after getting "disappeared" for a while. The family manage to escape Herat for Moscow, but it's only the beginning of their journey.

Eldest son Hussein (Ahmad Sakhi,) 14 at the time the story starts, was born with a heart defect that gives him cardiac arrhythmia and occasional fits which are getting more frequent. To find doctors who can help him, they'll need to make it to the UK.

Through routes legal and illegal, we follow the family to Ukraine, Austria, Germany, and eventually the dreaded Calais refugee camp and the expensive, dangerous crossings at night. Good and bad luck play a big part in their story - Mohammed's light skin helps him slip past Russian authorities specifically looking for Middle Eastern refugees, while an untied shoelace sabotages the family's first attempted Channel crossing - but an extended network of family, friends and people sympathetic to their plight is even more important. By the time they reach Cardiff, they consider the entire NHS to be part of that support network, as they rally to save Hussein.

Although there's moments of heartbreak this is a largely uplifting immigration story - in part this is because it begins well before 2010, the Hostile Environment and the decimation of the NHS, so for all their struggles to get here, once they do the family's asylum request is granted without unnecessary delays and cruelty, and Hussein is able to get treatment. It makes for a less hard-hitting immigration story than many I've seen on stage, but an equally compelling argument - it's hard to argue the UK seen in The Boy With Two Hearts isn't one we should be proud of and want to return to.

But what also keeps the evening genuinely fun and heartening is that it's a child's eye view of the story. Things do get very dark when the family think they're all going to suffocate while hidden in a lorry, but for the most part it's presented as an epic adventure. Amit Sharma's production manages the contrasts - the songs, written and performed by Elaha Soroor, present the more mournful, adult persepctive on the struggle, but it's Hayley Egan's video design that's the storytelling coup here: The animations are made up entirely of the words describing what's in the background, so a sun and moon made up of the words SUN and MOON, a HELICOPTER spinning over their heads, or white letters on a black background blinking like eyes in the dark.

It's an endlessly inventive conceit that also seamlessly means surtitles for the D/deaf can be integrated into every performance, as well as translations from Farsi and all the other languages encountered along the journey. The projector screen in the middle of Hayley Grindle's split-level set also doubles as secret compartments for the family to hide in while escaping. With the news of women in Iran facing the same kind of treatment as Fariba does at the start of the story, the play has added topicality, but regardless of the timing this is an involving and genuinely entertaining evening that shows the true potential not just of the determined characters at its heart, but of what this country can be.

The Boy With Two Hearts by Hamed & Hessam Amiri, adapted for the stage by Phil Porter, is booking until the 12th of November at the National Theatre's Dorfman.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Jorge Lizalde / studiocano.co.uk