Theatre review: Sons of the Prophet

I had mixed feelings about booking for Sons of the Prophet: Stephen Karam's last play at Hampstead Theatre was That American Play Where An Extended Family Gets Together After A Long Time, Preferably At Thanksgiving But That’s Optional, but surely even the most determined American playwrights can't write that one too many times, and the premise and cast were appealing. And the play, which takes its title from the central family's distant and regularly overplayed relation to Kahlil Gibran, is certainly not clichéd in its premise: It centres on two gay brothers from a Lebanese-American Maronite Christian family, from a part of Pennsylvania where all the towns seem to be named after places in the Middle East. A few years after their mother's death, their father also dies in a car crash after a student prank goes wrong.

Joseph Douaihy (Irfan Shamji) is a former star athlete who had to quit due to chronic knee pain which marked the start of a collection of neurological issues he's not yet found an explanation for. His job as assistant to the needy, wealthy widow Gloria (Juliet Cowan) is mainly a way for him to get the necessary health insurance.

While still dealing with their recent bereavement, Joseph and his teenage brother Charles (Eric Sirakian) also have to take in their uncle Bill (Raad Rawi,) whose own health is getting too bad for him to live alone. Essentially Sons of the Prophet follows Joseph as he has to navigate his own grief and physical pain while surrounded by people who want his help and attention, and while he's no longer a believer himself, it's all in the context of being raised in a Christian denomination that fetishises pain and suffering even more than most.

The story is pretty loose but the main plot thread follows a controversy over the student who pulled the fatal prank: Vin (Raphael Akuwudike) is a star football player and the judge has allowed him to put off his juvenile detention sentence until after a crucial game. The public interest in the case has led journalists to try and get a response from the Douaihy family, including ambitious local reporter Timothy (Jack Holden,) who emerges as a possible love interest for Joseph despite quite openly having an agenda for getting close to him.

Karam is here going for naturalism, both in the dialogue that sees people crash into each other's lives at inopportune moments before talking over each other, and in the story that avoids a neat plot with a tidy beginning, middle and end and leaves a lot unresolved. In fact by the end I felt like on paper I should have enjoyed Sons of the Prophet a lot less than I did, given how formless it can be and how resolutely it refuses to tie things up neatly. But something about it just works, from the witty dialogue, to the way it switches from thoughtful drama almost into rom-com mode between Joseph and Timothy (and possibly also between Charles and Vin.) Or maybe it's just that having Shamji make out with Holden seems to have involved reading into some particularly deep corners of my brain and put them on stage.

But there's no question the casting is one of the things that elevates Karam's text in Bijan Sheibani's production. Sirakian is a lovable mix of forthrightly queer and vulnerable, Cowan nightmarishly self-involved and Holden charming and manipulative without slipping into full-on villain mode. And it's hard to go wrong with Shamji in the lead role - I've started thinking of him as the male Patsy Ferran, in the sense of being an actor who went from "never heard of them" to "I must see everything they ever do" pretty much instantaneously. Here he's in a role that doesn't give him as much chance to charm the audience as usual, instead he's a melancholy presence that grounds the play and makes you really hope life can turn around for him.

I also have to credit designer Samal Blak for some of the production's success - technically just a plain black box with set elements coming in and out of it, the simple twist of angling it into a corner on two levels makes the show look just different and fresh enough to give it a distinct personality. Overall Sons of the Prophet is a strange one because it's hard to pin down how good Karam's play actually is on its own merits. What I can say is it's good enough that it gives Sheibani's production enough to be a hugely enjoyable, sometimes moving, sometimes funny, sometimes sexy evening that makes the time pass remarkably fast - I was shocked to look at my watch when I thought we were about halfway through, and see there was only 20 minutes left.

Sons of the Prophet by Stephen Karam is booking until the 14th of January at Hampstead Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.