Break the Floorboards

Synopsis

All Zain wants to do is dance - but his family, two left feet and the local fascists are all getting in the way. As the harsh reality of his jobless home town hits, Zain attempts to escape and turn his life into a showbiz world of fantasy...

Our Review:

Anne Morley-Priestman - 8 May 2013

You can't really compare previous productions from Rifco Arts with Break the Floorboards, the new piece from Pravesh Kumar and Yasmeen Khan. This one is billed as a dance drama, but – good as Kumar's street dance-inspired sequences are – it is the drama which dominates.

We're in one of those small towns with diminishing employment and an ethnically mixed population; the sort of place which is on White supremacist target lists. The family on which we concentrate is a single-parent one. That's ordinary perhaps in Western eyes but the mother of Zain and Adil feels despised and criticised by her own Muslim community. Actually, her husband simply walked out on her, trading her in for a younger model (as the saying has it).

Of the two teenage boys, Adil (Nathan Clarke) is politically aware and deeply resentful that he cannot be the breadwinner, the man of the house. Zain (Daniel Uppal) is still at school; his mother wants him to qual...

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