Christopher Walker reviews the P-Word at the Bush Theatre

The Bush theatre is celebrating fifty years of cutting-edge drama, with its production of the daring P-Word showing this fringe theatre has lost none of its bite.

It is a sharp-edged, moving, play with two outstanding performances.

It’s a rare thing to find an actor who can write a play and then star in it himself.

The temptation to upstage often unbalances a piece. But writer and actor Waleed Akhtar has pulled it off.

His face is well known to tv viewers. His credits have included Holby City, Casualty and Doctors.

His writing is less well known. He previously wrote Kabul Goes Pop (at the Brixton House) and I Don’t Know What To Do at the Vault.

This piece may change that. The Bush runs Emerging Playwrights scheme which showcases talent like Waleed’s.

In explaining his motivation for writing the P-Word, Waleed says ‘I really wanted to see a queer Muslim story that wasn’t pandering to the white gaze so thought I’d better write it.’

The plot concerns two characters both of Pakistani heritage who find themselves in Britain, though under very different circumstances.

Waleed’s own character Bilal (or Billy as he prefers to be known) has been brought over by his parents and has long ago cast off his Pakistani roots.

He hasn’t been back since he was sixteen.

Bilal is ground down by years of seeking love on the gay app Grindr which has led him into endless hook-ups without a positive result.

He is also torn by the complexity of being a brown gay man and obsessed with superficial physical attraction.

Summed up in his line ‘I’m like the best version of brown. I’m not even into Pakistanis, and I’d probably hook up with myself.’

By contrast Zafar has fled horrific persecution in Pakistan to seek asylum in the UK.

We learn that persecution was at the hands of his own family.

Esh Alladi brilliantly plays Zafar in a real tour de force performance.

For the first thirty minutes or so, the two characters live their isolated lonely lives without connecting with each other.

When they finally do meet in Soho, the resulting duet is electric, thanks to Waleed’s tight writing and both actors working well together.

Deirdre O’Halloran, Literary Manager of the Bush says it’s an “unlikely friendship in a time where it feels like we’re all increasingly divided, there is something quietly revolutionary about the people who manage to reach across barricades and find ways of communicating.”

Director Anthony Simpson-Pike keeps the action flowing, on Max Johns’ innovative revolving stage, symbolically circular but cut into two halves.

There are serious issues being dealt with here.

The Bush are working with Micro Rainbow to realise this production.

Micro Rainbow opened the first safe house in the United Kingdom dedicated solely to LGBTQI asylum seekers and refugees, and work to support them at all stages of the process.

Zafar is living in the asylum seekers centre in Hounslow, fearing deportation to an almost certain death back in Pakistan.

This political point is driven home at the end by a recording of a very shocking speech made just last month by the ex-Home Secretary, Priti Patel.

“This agreement, which I am proud to have signed with our Pakistani friends, shows the New Plan for Immigration in action and the government delivering. I make no apology for removing dangerous foreign criminals and immigration offenders who have no right to remain in the UK.”

The danger is that real asylum seekers like Zafar are swept up in this.

Tickets: https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/the-p-word-2022/

 

 

Pictured: left -Waleed Akhtar (Bilal) and right – Esh Alladi (Zafar)in ‘The P Word’ at Bush Theatre. Photo credit Craig Fuller.