Theatre review: Invisible

They say write what you know, so actor/writers performing their own work tend to deal with their own experiences in the job - or, as often as not, their difficulty in finding one, especially if they belong to a minority that tends to get typecast. In Nikhil Parmar's Invisible, we're in an alternate present where peace has unilaterally broken out in the Middle East, so South Asian actors don't even have the option of bad guy terrorist roles any more, and are stuck fighting it out for the doctors and shopkeepers. Parmar plays Zayan, a classically trained actor who's not had a role for a while, and has largely given up even auditioning because of his fear of rejection. He scrapes a living with catering jobs and occasionally weed-dealing for his cousins (when he doesn't get mugged for the drugs by children,) and the effect it's had on his state of mind is threatening his personal life: His ex-girlfriend is dating a more successful actor, and is wondering whether Zayan is stable enough to look after their young daughter, even for the odd weekend.

The hour-long monologue is an entertaining, often funny run through Zayan's life, professional and personal, and touching on the extent to which he's still haunted and affected by the loss of his beloved younger sister to a rare bone marrow disease.

But in the running joke where every time he looks away from something in the street - whether his daughter's pram or his flatmate's wheelchair - it ends up in the back of a rubbish van because they think it's been abandoned, is building a darker concern: This idea that he's so unprepossessing that people don't notice him starts to become a real feeling of invisibility, and that the world is leaving him behind. In a turn that comes a bit too late in the story to feel completely developed, he starts to wonder if "brown" = "bad guy" was such a bad thing after all, and whether he can do something to get it back.

I found Invisible equal parts interesting and frustrating - Georgia Green's production does a good job of balancing the chatty performance (very mild audience interaction) with the occasional flights of fancy and framing of the show as a film (there's an understated James Bond theme, implying the idea that an Asian Bond would never be considered*.) But it's a style that suits both the comedy and the emotional chaos of Zayan's life better than the anger that underpins the play. The point the play makes most successfully is that Zayan's (and by extension Parmar's) comic and dramatic chops are more interesting than the context-free "angry brown man" casting directors want from him; but it does mean the black comedy that builds out of that anger comes across like an afterthought.

Invisible by Nikhil Parmar is booking until the 16th of July at the Bush Theatre's Studio.

Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Ali Wright.

*I mean I've been saying Sacha Dhawan ever since he turned up on Daredevil, but apparently Barbara Broccoli doesn't consider me a trusted advisor on this issue because of insignificant things like she "isn't reading this," and "doesn't know I exist," rude.