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.

Theatre review: Beautiful Thing

Not that I've been at this for a while or anything, but you can read a review of the 20th anniversary production of Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful Thing on this blog, and now here's the 30th anniversary one, and a fresh look at the play that's in essence one that knows the script's strengths and plays to them. The fresh look is in the casting, which director Anthony Simpson-Pike wanted to allow young gay black kids to see themselves reflected in the characters. The only change I noticed in the script was a quick reference where Sandra asks Jamie if he's being bullied racially. Other than that the story's still as written, and very much in the early Nineties - in fairness I'm not sure how you could try to update jokes about Wincey Willis, let alone the specific point of gay history that inspired Harvey to write this rainbow-tinted play.

Theatre review: The P Word

Waleed Akhtar's two-hander at the Bush is about gay Pakistani men in their thirties, so the title The P Word could refer to a couple of different slurs; they get called both of them over the course of 90 minutes although it's the racially-charged one which features more, and which at times becomes a bone of contention between the pair. Akhtar himself plays Bilal, a second-generation British Muslim whose parents theoretically accept his sexuality, but with a level of tutting and undisguised hope that it might be a "phase" after all, that's left the family relationship sour. It's fractious, but it's a level of family peace asylum seeker Zafar (Esh Alladi) could only dream of: He's fled Pakistan in secret after his father discovered his sexuality and threatened to kill him. He's got connections in the army and the threat's no idle one: He did murder Zafar's boyfriend when he caught them together.