A British Subject
You might suppose that a hot new play about injustice in Pakistan and investigative journalism in Britain would focus on cricket corruption and phone-hacking.
But Nichola McAuliffe’s British subject is Mizir Tahir Hussain from Leeds, who was imprisoned on death row in Rawalpindi for 18 years after killing a cab driver within 24 hours of arriving “home” from Yorkshire.
The play was a hit at the Pleasance during the Edinburgh Festival two years ago, and Hannah Eidinow’s production now comes up sharp and kicking at the Arts.
McAuliffe repeats her delicious, sly performance as herself, a touring, slightly bitchy actress praying to St Jude (patron saint of lost causes) while her real-life crime reporter husband, Don Mackay (played by an impassioned David Rintoul in a permanent alcoholic sweat), smuggles himself into the prison to land a Daily Mirror exclusive.
At the short play’s centre – and ninety minutes now seems a bit skimpy for the multiplicity of themes and developments – Kulvinder Ghir repeats his slow, dignified account of submitting to his miserable fate.
Mackay paints a vivid picture of prison conditions while McAuliffe struggles with parking fines (his) back home. There’s a marked contrast between Tahir’s endurance and acceptance and the short fuse of Mackay, who finds his story down-paged at the back of the paper; his campaign is less telling than a moment of celebrity intervention.
It’s a bracingly honest touch to find this humiliation furiously offered as parallel, even comparable, to that of the prisoner. Nor does the play make a song and dance about Tahir’s innocence beyond allowing him to say that he killed in self-defence, after having been asked for his passport, and for sex, at gunpoint.
McAuliffe’s text has a high quota of funny lines, and its account of bi-focal concerns was tellingly reflected in the author/actress saluting both the victim and the journalist (her husband) from the stage on opening night.
