The Kiln ends the summer, and Indhu Rubasingham's time at the helm, with a very gentle take on the romantic comedy format: Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan's debut play sees a pair of Pakistani-British students at SOAS (a London university specialising in Asian, African and Middle-Eastern studies) who bond over both feeling a long way from home: Hafsah (Humera Syed) is a strict Muslim from Bradford and doesn't believe in dating before marriage - although she also doesn't really believe in marriage anyway, having seen how most of them seem to work out. She initially (accurately) sums up Bilal (Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain) as "the kind of Bilal who lets white people call him Billy," but his strong Pakistani-Brummie accent means she doesn't dismiss him completely: He too is more religious than he initially appears but with complicated feelings on relationships (his entire experience of Pakistani dads is that they leave their families, and he doesn't want to become part of that pattern.)
