Theatre review: The Real Ones

The creative team behind The P Word return to the Bush for what feels like another autobiographical story from Waleed Akhtar - especially given that both leads are aspiring playwrights - about life as a gay British-Pakistani man. This time the scope feels wider though, as it takes us through the sometimes melancholy story of a close friendship over almost twenty years. Zaid (Nathaniel Curtis) and Neelam (Mariam Haque) were friends at school, but only become especially close at the age of 19, when we first meet them: Zaid has moved away to study, and as her parents have only allowed her to go to a local university so she can stay at home, visiting him (while pretending to be on a getaway for young Muslim girls) is one of the only ways Neelam can expand her horizons. Their parents' expectations are something that follow them for much of the story - Akhtar's play is called The Real Ones, and at times it feels as if it's only with each other that they show their real selves.

So Neelam becomes the first person Zaid comes out to, but his fear of upsetting his parents means he gets well into his thirties without telling them - even after his relationship with his tutor Jeremy (Anthony Howell) has been going on for several years.

Neelam has already disappointed her family after her having extramarital sex became the big gossip at school, but even as she's older and settles into a mature relationship with Deji (Nnabiko Ejimofor) she takes a long time to tell them about him (the theme of putting on a front for their parents extends to Deji - hers won't approve of him because he's black, he expects his to judge her for being Muslim and working class.)

Anthony Simpson-Pike's production takes place on Anisha Fields' sunken circular set, putting the pair and their relationships under a microscope, and we can see the ways they know each other better than themselves: When trying to get onto a playwrighting course in their twenties, Neelam knows that the play her friend really needs to write is one exploring his first relationship, when he was underage with a man decades older, and how that's affected his being drawn to older men - a play Zaid won't actually get round to for another ten years.

But this also marks the point when their friendship starts to change: The writer who shows the most promise, Neelam gives up on that dream because she doesn't want to compromise, becoming a lawyer instead, while Zaid pursues it by initially trying too hard to write what he thinks the theatres want from him. It's not immediately obvious but from here on the title begins to be ironic - it takes them a long time to realise they've created their own ideas of who the other has become as they've got older, and no longer actually know the real person.

I personally find these plays about loving platonic friendships turning ugly almost unbearably sad to watch, which is why The Real Ones isn't a play I can entirely love (in other minor negatives, it gets a bit flabby in the middle, and the very vague way everyone talks about the theatres they're working with feels forced - couldn't all the writer's groups be set in generic theatre names like "The Playhouse?") But if the way things work out are capable of upsetting me, everyone must have been doing something right in the first place in giving us a relationship to root for - Curtis and Haque share great chemistry and Akhtar gives them snappy, spiky dialogue. Funny and sad, it hits some of the wrong buttons for me but objectively I can see that this is more great stuff from this team.

The Real Ones by Waleed Akhtar is booking until the 26th of October at the Bush Theatre's Holloway.

Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.