Review: Heroine (HighTide Festival)

HighTide festival, ensconced in its round, cavernous brand new space at pop-up venue The Mix, reflects the democratic nature of theatre. Audiences and actors are equals, and all voices are heard, monitored and weighed up, no matter how much personal views may conflict with those of the characters on stage. It's an important sentiment, and an essential one for Nessah Muthy's Heroine, directed by HighTide artistic director Steven Atkinson.

We begin with Grace, a former soldier, returning from Afghanistan after being discharged. She, reluctantly at first, becomes friends with a group of activist women (Wendy, Cheryl and Beverley) in a Croydon community centre, hyper-realistically created by designer Richard Kent. What originally seems to be an amicable space for bingo and baked goods becomes something more controversial after the revelation that the community centre is to be bought up by a Saudi group. They plan to turn the space into a Wahhabi mosque or, as Wendy puts it, 'a terrorist breeding ground, right in our home'.

Just like its fellow show on the HighTide roster, Kanye the First, this is theatre unafraid to shock. It’s uncomfortable viewing, especially when the group begin actively protesting against the Saudi buyout as well as the "privileged white liberals" facilitating the removal of the centre. Grace, returning from war, now has a new battle to fight. The press get wind of their actions and the women are branded islamophobes and racists.

Anger turns into violence, and Grace is at the centre of it all. "This isn't hatred, it's love", she says, just as those activists she befriended turn away from her. The whole play becomes caustic, as the desire to protect one’s family (in her case, a two month-old daughter) transforms from care to neglect. Muthy doesn't let up, burdening each character with their own set of problems and, as a result, crams the 90 minutes with a non-stop barrage of exposition and sadness.

This means that the tempo of Heroine is uneven, undermined by a hasty final scene stuffed with explosive drama. Tranquil heart-to-heart moments in the show’s middle are also overly static. Muthy misses a trick by not spending more time discussing how we stereotype people with xenophobic views, rather than acknowledge the reasons for such beliefs.

Asmara Gabrielle completes a solid physical transformation as Grace, moving from an upright, pursed-lipped soldier, back from the front, to a desperate and aggravated protestor. Among the rest of the cast, Maggy McCarthy's endearing Beverley works well, and becomes the moral battleground for different ideas raging in the community centre.

It was great to see an all-female cast depicting such knotty and complex issues and HighTide can be commended for tackling such a powerful piece head on. While the concept promises more than it delivers, Heroine is the sort of show that cannot be overlooked.

Heroine runs at HighTide Festival in Walthamstow until 8 October. It will then transfer to Theatr Clwyd from 18 October to 4 November.