Peanut butter and blueberries are, rather alarmingly, Bilal’s favourite sandwich filling. He thinks the two dramatically different textures help each other go down better. In other words, his lunch is an allegory for Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s bittersweet British Muslim romcom, in which the roughcut Brummie lad meets cute - or cute-ish - with Hafsah, a demure but steely lass from Bradford.
The two second generation immigrants – his family is Pakistani, hers Afghan – are studying at the same university in London - her gender studies (studiously), him South Asian studies (haphazardly). But they both feel like outsiders. Slowly, a friendship develops. It threatens to be something more, yet also constantly threatens to fall apart, largely because of his volatile nature - an explosive sensitivity to Islamophobia, a stifling concern for his vulnerable mother.
Manzoor-Khan’s play works because it both celebrates the romcom – to a large extent it is made of comfortingly familiar beats – and yet the fact it’s about two devout young Muslims intrinsically subverts the form. A pair of outsiders find each other in London and experience a bumpy journey towards acknowledging their feelings: so far, so conventional. But there’s
no snogging or touching or even flirting in the conventional sense, and when the prospect of being something more than friends finally comes up it’s a delicate negotiation as to what they’d do next: marriage is unquestionably the only way forward for them as a couple, but the gifted Hafsah has a bright future ahead of her and Bilal’s head is a mess; she has agency here. It’s a short, delicate play that takes its characters’ faith as a given then works out from there.
Despite Khadija Raza’s revolving set, Sameena Hussain’s production feels overly static, with not a huge amount going on physically and much of the dialogue consisting of the characters narrating. The characters are winning, but sometimes feel like sketches, lacking in meat in some areas – there’s a whole plot strand about Hafsah’s seemingly bright future as a science fiction author that feels weirdly under-discussed between the two. Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain’s puppyish but volatile turn as Bilal and Humera Syed’s bookish but low-key sassy Hafsah are enjoyable, but heavier-weight performances might have given Hussain’s production extra heft and depth.
Still, it’s an impressive playwriting debut from Mansoor-Khan. She’d hardly be the first British Muslim playwright, but there’s something about the seamless integration of faith into her narrative that marks her out – and certainly she has a much defter touch with personal religion than she does with sandwich metaphors.