In drama, an audience can either be ahead of what the characters know, or behind them, catching up; each approach has its dramatic advantages and disadvantages, but what is needed for either is clarity of approach. Iman Qureshi's latest play (winner of the Papatango theatre company's New Writing prize, and currently to be seen in a co-production with English Touring Theatre) unfortunately reveals too little to be genuinely surprising, and does so clumsily too.
That Qureshi attempts to discuss Abrahamic religions' attitudes to non-heterosexual relationships, and to do so impartially, without preaching, is admirable.
Ayesha is a British Pakistani who, with husband Zeyd, runs a Muslim funeral directors’ business in "a small divided town in the Midlands". Both business and marriage are in trouble: respectively, because of a lack of sufficient customers, and her seeming reluctance to have much sex, let alone children. Then into their lives walks distraught Tom, a young white man looking to arrange a Muslim funeral for his boyfriend, who has died after a drugs overdose. The crux of what follows is based on their refusal to perform the funeral, and Tom's subsequent decision to sue them for sexual discrimination.
Even Ayesha's oldest (and once-closest) friend Janey, now a London-based human-rights barrister, reluctantly back in town to see her ailing mother, is appalled by their decision, and initially refuses to help. Yet here's the rub. Initially, we're given no firm indication of either Ayesha's or Zeyd's attitudes to homosexuality. Possibly quite deliberately, neither Qureshi's script, Hannah Hauer-King's direction or the cast's performance deny the possibility that the refusal is because Tom's boyfriend's death was, intentionally or not, a suicide. Later, when Janey suggests this could be their best form of defence, it seems all too obvious.
That Qureshi attempts to discuss Abrahamic religions' attitudes to non-heterosexual relationships, and to do so impartially, without preaching, is admirable, but there's a sense of things being too tightly written to be entirely believable; or, indeed, sufficiently surprising to have real dramatic impact. (Not least the all-too-guessable "revelation" concerning Ayesha's and Janey's school-girl relationship. Janey's confession to feeling "like I'm a foreigner in the place I was born" is also breathtakingly unsubtle; so much for her supposed understanding of Ayesha's own life in the "small-minded, small-town backwardness" she herself was lucky enough to escape.
Nevertheless this production has much going for it: Aryana Ramkhalawon (Ayesha) offers a portrait of nuanced sadness, which beautifully blooms in a heartfelt connection with Francesca Zoutewelle’s Janey. The two men may have less emotional room, but Assad Zaman’s Zeyd is a loving husband who’s neither bully nor monster, while Edward Stone’s Tom at last shines when Ayesha, attempting reconciliation, asks him to tell her about his boyfriend. The message: there are no easy solutions, but there’s still hope for us all.
