Writer Waleed Akhtar returns to The Bush Theatre
★★★☆☆
The Bush Theatre has a near faultless record in delivering heartfelt and insightful productions to London audiences, with their most recent hit enjoying a run in the West End but this latest outing from the talented, The P Word writer, Waleed Akhtar, stumbles in its execution. Though brimming with promise the play fails to meet the ambition of the concept.
Charting the friendship of Zaid (Nathaniel Curtis) and Neelam (Mariam Haque) from teenagers to thirty-somethings, The Real Ones examines a friendship across decades. The love, the loss and milestones as the pair cascade in and out of each other’s lives. Both from Muslim Pakistani backgrounds and raised in London the two navigate the pressures of their heritage, Zaid unable to tell his family about his sexuality and later Neelam fearful to tell her parents she is dating a black man. They initially share the same dream of escaping, becoming writers and finding their place in the world but as always life and circumstance get in the way.
Unsurprisingly Akhtar’s writing is tender and honest, gifting us fast insight into who these people are. Still, as the lengthy one-act play progresses it feels like a slow dash to the finish line - the vagueness of the events increasing in the hopes of finding a satisfying conclusion. Key life moments are skirted around, only ever teased or gently referred back to so we struggle to connect to the characters beyond surface level. As the momentum of time picks up, reasoning and understanding become less important as the characters become further alien to us.
Despite this, there is swathes of authenticity to Akhtar’s writing and characters. The struggles as they seek to understand how to live their modern lives within their inherited identity are painful and truthful. Neelam seeks out compromise as she matures, picking her battles and outgrowing some of her more youthful ways of thinking, unlike Zaid who remains stubborn, outwardly content (though inwardly not) in living a double life. The script excels as it conveys the timeless collision between tradition and youth, the concessions and the impasses, searching for a way through.
Mariam Haque is brilliant as Neelam, evolving exquisitely from overconfident adolescence into adulthood before us, the weight of responsibility and life evident in her tone and movement. She is barely recognisable between beginning and end, an absolute testament to her grounded performance. Nathaniel Curtis’s Zaid is too excellent though we never quite witness the same change in his character and as a result, it is Haque that steals the scenes, Curtis unable to find the growth within the limitations of the text.
This play carefully unpacks trauma that many can relate to, but this piece feels unfinished. The play has room to be shrunk in some areas and expanded upon in others, the current imbalance holding all aspects back. There are great performances and beautiful moments but there is scope for this to develop into something greater.
Currently booking until 26th October - Tickets
Photography - Helen Muray
