CHAOS. To 14 May.

London

CHAOS
by Azma Dar

Southwark Playhouse In rep to 14 May 2005
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 3.30pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval

TICKETS: 08700 600100
www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 April

Hard choices need a firmer context.Kali Theatre's repertory of 2 plays by Muslim women shows British Asian theatre mature enough to face head-on the strains in Muslim communities and lives. In Chaos political tensions are illustrated within the Rizvi family. Father wants to climb English society from within as New Labour councillor for Wembley and gratifies himself by flattering local bigwigs. He's followed, initially at least, by his son Salim. Yet his other son Babar sticks to the Muslim values of his mother and, during post-9/11 backlashes against Islam, leaves to join the struggle abroad.

Then there's Aunty Moona, taking life as it comes, inveigling her way to meet Mr Rizvi's friends so she can jingle her collecting-box for a new Urdu school. After a lot of comedy early on, the play switches to a far more sombre mood. But it's a long dramatic road between trivial details like Rizvi's insistence on hanging his election poster straight early in act one and his wife's sudden switch to blessing her beloved Babar's leaving near the act's end, in angry reaction to her husband denouncing the cause - a road playwright Azma Dar travels in rocky fashion.

Janet Steel's production doesn't smooth the way. Rizvi is a figure of fun from the start. Even Nicholas Khan's strong performance plays for laughs, making subsequent debate more lopsided than the poster. Yet author Azma Dar has some successful comic moments she'd be a contender as a female Asian John Godber.

There are striking moments, too, in the serious material. Shelley King plays the devout mother with a glumness that makes her husband's optimistic energy seem necessary if the household's not to sink into terminal gloom. But her final change provides a strong, thematic shock.

She enters with excessive make-up, a parody of beauty, cracking under the strain, or angrily mocking Rizvi in her interpretation of a wife's duty to please her husband. It leads to a subsequent, more contrived scene of suspense, but it shows Dar's potential as a dramatist once she lets characters breathe beyond the range of her immediate sympathies.

Salim: Damian Asher
Babar: Marc Elliott
Mr Rizvi: Nicholas Khan
Mrs Rizvi: Shelley King
Aunty Moona: Jamila Massey

Director: Janet Steel
Designer: Matthew Wright
Lighting: Chris Corner
Composer: Sayan Kent
Dramaturg: Penny Gold
Assistant director: Sophie Austin

2005-04-25 13:57:08