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After a car bomb explodes, there’s more than just dust hanging in the air. Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s play (translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles) is a look at the toxic atmosphere of suspicion that floats around Sweden’s Muslim population after a suspected terrorist attack.
Despite the horror that precedes it, the play’s got a low key, gentle feel. It’s really just the story of Amor (Richard Sumitro), a lonely, nerdy man, walking round the city and periodically calling his friends for reassurance – the only drama’s in his head. But it’s compelling, too, as ideas of racial profiling and cultural kinship saturate tiny moments like trying to exchange a drill in a hardware shop, or making eye contact with a policeman.
Director Tinuke Craig’s production feels faintly underpowered: instead of amping up the potential tension as Amor slips into paranoid fantasies, she and designer Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey heighten his loneliness by putting the play’s three other performers in three unmarked, side-by-side glass telephone booths. Until he calls upon them, they stare like bored commuters, or quietly knit.
But when they do step forward, they take us deeper into Amor’s weird little world. Shavi (Jonas Khan) used to be his right hand man – now, he’s more of an irritation, for his constant proud chatter about his baby’s progress with solids. But a call to him can still make everything right.
Valeria (Nadia Albina) is a bit more complicated: he’s been obsessed with her since school. And Ahlem (Lanna Joffrey) infuriates him in the way she’s created her own culture, becoming a Buddhist and developing a life and voice that’s alien to him.
At its core, ‘I Call My Brothers’ is less about terrorism, more about kinship. It’s about using shared cultural heritage as a bulwark against a wider society that only sometimes feels like home. Written in Sweden in 2015, it’s got a gentleness that you couldn’t imagine finding in a play written in Britain in 2016, when a post-Brexit surge in racist violence means Muslims are in danger from more than just suspicion. But something about Amor’s quiet, neurotic fury still stings.