Word-Play
Royal Court, Upstairs | ★★★✩✩

At its best Rabiah Hussain’s uneven play triggers our collective and personal memories. At its worst it is a laboured cry against establishment prejudice. The evening is divided into sometimes intense, at others times long-winded scenes with characters in heightened situations.

The first is playfully written in the style of The Thick Of It. Set in No 10’s press office, the PM’s comms team are in meltdown because their boss has said something decidedly offensive on air.

Panicked aides grasp at strategies to diffuse the situation. Perhaps stressing a word here or another there in the quote might change the context or deflect from the obvious interpretation.

One of the team suggests blaming AI or saying that the whole thing was maliciously edited to make fake news, even though the foot-in-mouth-moment happened on live TV.

It is, however, when the team desperately attempt to find synonyms for “sorry” — the one word no prime minister ever wants to say —that the objective of Hussain’s play, to explore the power of language, begins to emerge. The ripples of the political crisis later infect scenes set in other contexts such as a dinner party in a Highgate sitting room.

Here one of the diners defends the PM by observing that he was only expressing out loud what other people are thinking privately. The cleverness of Hussain’s writing lies in never revealing what was actually said, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps from real life. Boris Johnson’s premiership provided many such moments.

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Yusra Warsama (Photo: Johan Persson)

Another tableau, this time set in a flat in Peckham, also benefits from the source of the conflict being withheld. Here the early promise of a relationship breaks down when one half the couple asks what the other meant when she described him as “different” to her friends.

Under pressure she blurts she meant different from other people who share his background. I am guessing that Hussain is writing from the perspective of a Muslim.

But much of the scene recalls almost word for word a real-life situation from my own past when my then girlfriend, a non-Jew, described me to her friends as different, which I knew was short hand for “Jewish but different from other Jews”. I let it slide.

In Hussain’s play, however, the offended party doesn’t, and the scene builds magnificently, forcing out into the open that which is hidden by the seemingly innocuous word.

A later scene is less successful.

A mother’s monologue describes how the authorities suspect her of fostering extremist ideology in her daughter because she took her to visit her pa rents in the country of her birth.

The described events are both convincing and disgraceful.

But this and other sections of Nimmo Ismail’s sure-footed production leave nothing to the imagination. It drips with righteous indignation.

Funny how as soon as a playwright uses their play as a platform to expose deeply felt injustices the evening so often becomes deadly dull and leaden.