Courtyard Theatre, Hoxton, London – until 4 August 2018
Reviewed by Lisa Harlow
2**
The title of the play does not give its game away. It sounds rather like a teenage girl’s magazine article. Most of the characters are indeed teenagers, but most of the dialogue would not be featuring in a typical teenage magazine!
We follow four teenagers exhibiting typical heightened hormones and preoccupations with sex, drugs and partying in London until their interrelation with each other is corroded by the events of the terrorist attack of July 7th, 2005, which took place on the London tube. The initial spark of love between Destiny (Holly Ashman) and Anjum (Sulin Hasso) is quickly marred by news of the attack, and in spite of Anjum actually being Hindu, the corrupting influence of Destiny’s father’s membership of the EDL and the web of intolerance and beliefs soon overtakes Destiny and she views her old love primarily through the eyes of contempt. Anjum attempts to remove this misty veil from her eyes to be ‘seen’ for who she is, at times through confrontation, and allow their initial connection of love to reign. Jack (Alex Britt) whose father is killed in the attack, works through his mess of grief with Katie (Grace Hadleigh), both of whom hold true candles for each other. Meanwhile, a Muslim teacher (Ikky Elyas) who survived the attack but lives out its events every day and grapples with post-traumatic stress disorder, delivers his pain through monologues.
The monologues often feel rather flat in spite of the content. There is some occasional humour through the performance, and the dialogue carries you along, but it is not until a catastrophic event that pulls all the characters together that I felt emotionally engaged with them and the plot. Destiny, in particular, provides glimpses of depth, delivering inner schism between her hardened protective racist shell and vulnerability. The event changes each of them and their relationship to each other, shunted back onto the path of redemption: quite incredulously so for the teacher given what happens to him. This event erupts rather out of nowhere in spite of Silver’s best efforts to build the fire, but the alchemy within Destiny I found again the most interesting, and I felt genuinely moved by it.
Stephanie Silver, the writer, explained that she wished to portray ‘a gritty portrayal of working class multi-culturalism’ (SW Londoner, March 15th). It is gritty due to the issues it embraces (pornography, losing virginity, drugs, grief, terrorism, racism, lesbianism) and the often brutal, ill developed teenage way of communicating thoughts and desires. But the scope it covers means it doesn’t deal with most of these issues in any depth. Maybe the intention was to show the breadth of unfathomable modern day issues teenagers are faced with amongst the complexities of race, faith and terrorism. It has a good premise, to view how the flames were fanned post this tragedy, but it just didn’t quite explain or weave the characters lives together in enough dimensions to truly grip me until the end of the play.