The Real Ones at the Bush Theatre – review

Waleed Akhtar announced his arrival as a playwright with The P Word, a gay love story that raised difficult issues with great sensitivity and power. This follow up is about a friendship between two people with strict Muslim Pakistani backgrounds, both trying to find a way of resolving their own dreams and desires while honouring the love they feel for their families.

It’s a fascinating subject, and Akhtar again reveals a remarkable ability gently to burrow towards the heart of difficult conversations. But in covering 18-years in the lives of best friends Neelam, who has ruined her reputation by having sex with a school friend, and Zaid, who is gay, Akhtar allows the impact of his observations to diminish.

As the piece progresses through more than two hours without an interval it feels over extended and the writing tips into generality.

What makes it so watchable, though, are two beautifully detailed and naturalistic performances from Mariam Haque, who gently charts Neelam’s journey from loud-mouthed rebel to contented conformist and Nathaniel Curtis as Zaid, who manages to make both being hurt and being hurtful totally convincing.

In Anthony Simpson-Pike’s tightly held production, we first meet the pair at a nightclub, chanting their love for one another under neon lights and smoke. Anisha Field’s set places a depressed, carpeted circle at the centre of the space and films of plastic hiding the back. At different points, characters either vanish from view or sit at the side of the stage, watching the action.

As the narrative tracks the slow disintegration of the friendship, short scenes bleed one into another, distinctions of time and place made by Christopher Nairne’s subtle lighting and Xana’s unobtrusive and clever soundtrack.

The play and the production are at their best when charting the distinct difficulties the couple face: they are both playwrights (at least initially), which allows Akhtar to make sharp digs at the expectations of British theatres when commissioning writers of Asian origin. The fact that one of the commissioners, Jeremy (Anthony Howell) becomes Zaid’s older white lover adds a layer of tension. So does the arrival of Deji (Nnabiko Ejimofor), who becomes Neelam’s husband to the initial horror of her family.

The writing probes the complications these changes bring – and the complexities of race and class that make the friends’ lives so difficult to navigate. The choices they make eventually tear apart the fabric of friendship that they believed was woven for ever. But this is also where the play falls into more generic assumptions.

The later stages have a sense of a playwright trying to find his way through an imagined future; they lack the devastating honesty and authenticity of the earlier scenes. I didn’t buy for a moment the idea that childbirth would become an impossible hurdle for a friendship to navigate. But the fact that I cared enough about Neelam and Zaid to doubt the reality of the development of their relationship is a tribute to just how involving the production is.