I choose to believe that the name of Mohamed-Zain Dada’s new drama about a speed awareness course in Birmingham is a nod to the seminal Keanu Reeves ‘90s thriller of the same name.
Okay, it would have to be an ironic nod. But not as ironic as you might think. Speed starts off in wilfully mundane Britcom territory, but ends up somewhere rather more Reeves-friendly.
Harleen, Samir and Faiza are a mismatched trio of British Asians who’ve each acquired nine points on their driving licences. This course is their last chance: get through it, and they have a reprieve. Don’t, and there’s no more driving for the foreseeable. Unfortunately they have to contend with Nikesh Patel’s stupendously annoying Abz, the course leader.
Like the ungodly offspring of Alan Partridge and Pauline from League of Gentlemen, Abz spouts patronising cliches and wields his leverage over the group like a cudgel: if they don’t go along with his course they can kiss driving bye bye. Nonetheless, he seems to genuinely want to help them better themselves. But what’s with his bizarre, therapy-like techniques? Why does he keep running off to answer his phone? And it is weird that everyone here is Asian?
No spoilers, but despite the fact we never leave Tomás Palmer’s magnificently mundane hotel function room set (complete with a real fish tank), Dada takes us on quite a journey over 80 minutes.
At first the playwright simply has fun with the characters and the set up. Patel’s uptight Abz is a lot of fun of course – if he feels somewhat redolent of classic white sitcom characters, then increasingly it feels that this may be how he’s invented himself as he lectures the trio about ‘British values’ while refusing to even acknowledge their shared ethnicity. But Shazia Nicolls is a proper scene stealer as the narcissistic but weirdly likeable ‘girl boss’ Faiza. And as the more grounded characters, Arian Nik and Sabrina Sandhu are great – Nik is Samir, a self-regarding petrolhead with serious insecurities; Sandhu is Harleen, an NHS nurse with a towering but justified sense of rage at the world.
For all their eccentricities, the three course takers are resigned to gritting their teeth and taking the course. But as time wears on, Abz becomes weirdly insistent on analysing the incidents that led to them being sent here, furiously scolding them for their misjudgements.
Things get tense. Then they get weird.
I’m not going to say weird in what way, precisely. But I will say that the slight goofiness of the early sections and director Milli Bhatia’s clippy pace keeps it far enough away from naturalism to allow for a breathtaking acceleration – and virtual genre change – at the end that somewhat defies plausibility, but has the momentum to carry it off.
Eighty minutes is the perfect runtime – much longer and it’d get bogged down in explaining itself. But as it is, Speed thrills.
