THE BUSH THEATRE – UNTIL 17th MAY 2025
REVIEWED BY JACKIE THORNTON
4****
A flipchart, stark lighting, a few conference chairs and a sad buffet can only mean one thing: a training day.
In Olivier nominated playwright Mohamed-Zain Dada’s latest play, three speeding offenders must either complete a speed awareness and aggressive driving course run by maverick instructor Abz, played with aching sincerity – “Driving is not a human right, it’s a privilege” – by Nikesh Patel, or, lose their driving licences.
Faiza is CEO of Asia Specific, one of the biggest fashion brands in the UK, and is awaiting news of a big deal. Shazia Nicholls is superb as the self-important and ambitious entrepreneur who let her temper get the better of her in a road rage incident. Arian Nik’s comic timing as hapless but charming boy racer Samir is flawless and his delivery of some of the play’s funniest lines had the audience in stitches. The third attendee is nurse Harleen, her seething impatience and indignation wonderfully rendered by Sabrina Sandhu. She should be caring for the sick not appeasing this jobsworth Abz.
Milli Bhatia’s slick direction extracts every ounce of comedy from the absurdity of the situation as we, and the participants, gradually realise that this may not be any ordinary DVLA course and that their tutor is becoming unhinged.
Things take on a darker and altogether angrier edge as the play moves on to explore issues
of racism, racial profiling and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes. An unsettling lighting design by Jessica Hung Han Yun allows us to intermittently experience a dissociative space where time is suspended and Abz enters into a world he calls the Johari Window. In class it’s a tool to work on self-awareness and unconscious-bias but for Abz’s fizzing interior world, it becomes a window to buried emotion.
Speed is not only a clever satire of the glib way many drivers treat road safety and an honest exploration of how British-Asians see themselves but also a treatise on that all too familiar human emotion: anger.