Step into Zara's kitchen and you'll be put to work, a knife slotted into one hand and an onion in the other. There are people to feed and she’s got enough to worry about.
Emteaz Hussain’s anxious, sometimes heavy-handed domestic drama frames a clash between two estranged sisters. Yasmin (Lena Kaur, a sharpness in her gaze) is trying to close the distance between them, while Zara (Avita Jay, her care cloaked by fear) is deliberately pushing her sibling further away. But when Yasmin lets herself in, dumps her bags on the counter and puts the kettle on, Zara’s avoidance tactics quickly fall apart.
A sober discussion of Islamophobia and misogyny, Expendable is told through the lens of a fraught family desperately trying to hold itself together in the face of crisis: Zara's son Raheel (a morose Gurjeet Singh) has been falsely accused of being part of a grooming gang, his face splashed across the front page of the paper as one of ‘The Forestdale Ten’.
Tempers are on a short fuse. Under Esther Richardson’s direction, everyone is on the edge of snapping right from the start. Nerves remain high throughout, missing out on moments of softness and leaving little space for tension to ramp up when more bombshells drop from victim Jade (energetic Maya Bartley O’Dea) and Zara’s earnest activist daughter Sofia (Humera Syed, full of wide-eyed outrage).
Most of the action the family responds to is happening offstage; the protests, counter-protests and arrests that hold the men at the centre of attention. Instead, on Natasha Jenkins’ naturalistic set, we witness the women's furious, furrowed conversations around the kitchen table as they argue over how to respond and recapture the media’s narrative, which is painting all Muslim men as predators and ignoring the girls at the heart of the issue. At times the dialogue spells out the subtext more obviously than is necessary, but there is complex subtlety here too, particularly in Yasmin’s challenging of who their community rallies around, and who it kicks to the curb.
As another round of tea is made, this play asks who to trust, which parts of your beliefs to hold close and which to question. Among its dark topics are glimmers of light as the sisters gradually inch closer to each other, learning how to ask for help, how to offer it, and how to fight as one.
