Street culture

What Fatima Did…
Hampstead

Mrs Klein
Almeida

What Fatima Did… is billed as a play. Really, it’s a fugue, a variation on a theme, a crude and boisterous tone poem. The plot is deliberately small-scale. A gang of fun-loving inner-city sixth-formers are shocked to learn that one of their pals, Fatima, has forsaken Western values and adopted the nijab. Her boyfriend George is hit hardest by her betrayal, and he retaliates by showing up at a costume party dressed as a medieval crusader. This gesture doesn’t quite work now that the flag of St George has been reinvented as a multicultural symbol. To freak Fatima out properly he’d have to dress as Adolf or Enoch.

That aside, this slender and skilfully elaborated drama is an outstanding piece of entertainment. I loved its cynical wit, its self-confident scepticism, its freedom, its energy and fun. I loved the cast, too, especially Farzana Dua Elahe as a mouthy Asian sex-pot. Here she is reacting to the suggestion that Fatima is merely expressing herself. ‘I find that offensive. I’m a Muslim and I don’t wear the nijab to “express myself”. I’d rather have a pint.’ Shobu Kapoor is hilarious, and moving, too, as the claret-swilling Pakistani mother who has fought all her life to drag her co-religionists into the light of modernity only to see her daughter plunge back into 13 centuries of darkness. Most of all I loved the audience and its gleeful reaction to this unsanitised glimpse of street culture. It’s rare to see a row of venerable Hampstead matrons quivering with laughter at an in-yer-face (literally) masturbation joke.

The venerable matrons were out in force again at the Almeida for Nicholas Wright’s new play, Mrs Klein. Where does Wright get his ideas from? A hat, probably.