What Fatima Did

He may have made us wait seven years, but hats off to Hampstead's Artistic Director Anthony Clark for nurturing striking new talent Atiha Sen Gupta. A 21-year-old playwriting debutante from Hampstead's youth theatre company, her voice is assured, playful and truthful, drawing diamond-sharp vistas of the multicultural young London most dramatists fail to acknowledge.
The Fatima of her title is a former drinking and smoking 'queen of the morning after the night before' who returns from the summer holiday before her 18th birthday with a new-found appreciation of her Islamic heritage and a hijab on her head.

Like the central character in Anupama Chandrasekhar's Royal Court debut 'Free Outgoing' we never actually meet Fatima, a device which attempts to focus our attention on the response of her family and racially-mix group of friends: her liberal mum is horrified, her best friend feels betrayed and her white boyfriend feels so alienated that he rips it off. Unfortunately, the audience ends up just as frustrated with the heroine lodged behind a closed door.

Director Kelly Wilkinson has assembled a brilliant cast of young talent and Gupta's writing has all the fierce political debate and neck-snapping sass you'd expect from a writer for 'Skins' who also happens to be the daughter of a Southall Black Sister. Even at 1hr 45mins this sometimes sags under the weight of its numerous arguments. But this is a memorable debut from Gupta and a classy goodbye from Clark.