Waleed Akhtar’s last play ‘The P Word’ was a love story: two gay men from different worlds, exploring attitudes to sexuality, racism, asylum seekers. It was a huge hit and won an Olivier Award. His new play is a love story, too, but of a very different kind. Starting as a period piece in 2006, we hurtle through almost two decades of friendship between Zaid and Neelam. Zaid is gay, Neelam has ‘a reputation’ after sleeping with a classmate. Both come from fairly strict Pakistani Muslim families. They start off in sync: uni, clubbing, first loves. Then they start to weave in and out of each other’s paths. And then they diverge.
Akhtar writes their (initially) uncomplicated platonic love as brilliantly as he does their crackling arguments. it’s hard not to fall for Zaid, a sweet and optimistic Nathaniel Curtis, who adds a bitter note of self-interest as the play goes on, and Mariam Haque’s Neelam - a superb performance - who starts cynical and sarcastic, with flashes of beautiful sincerity, before modulating her accent and muting her brashness as she gets older and settles into a good job, starts a family.
Director Anthony Simpson-Pike has the duo flitter through the staccato scenes in a sunken circle, the many locations summoned with Christopher Nairne’s brilliantly busy lighting.
With Zaid and Neelam wannabe playwrights, Akhtar chucks in plenty of in-jokes about the theatre world, its approach to programming Asian writers, and its demands on the content of their plays. But he always makes sure there’s a bigger picture: essentially, the cruelty and absurdity of not being able to love who you love due to religious, racial and other pressures.
Although one of the play’s great strengths is the scope of it, the way Akhtar adds more and more of life’s complicating factors into the mix and seeing how his characters respond, 18 years is a long period and sometimes the play feels like it’s playing out in real time. It’s too long, and starts to get repetitive, plus some of it feels a bit too familiar, a bit tropey.
But where Akhtar really nails it is in perfectly capturing the special kind of love between a gay man and his female best friend - and the peculiar sadness of losing that love when life gets in the way.
