Multitudes

John Hollingworth’s first full-length play, ‘Multitudes’, is far funnier than it should be. Strip it down to its synopsis and it sounds like a fairly mechanical exercise in political theatre, a production aching to be relevant, but it manages to be and do much more than that, and is written with wit and an appealing lightness of touch.

Set in Bradford – Hollingworth’s home city – in the run-up to the Conservative Party Conference, it’s a fairly nuanced piece about what it is to be both British and Muslim. Natalie, a teacher and the girlfriend of local councillor Kash, decides to convert to Islam. This decision ends up having ramifications on all of their relationships, professional and familial. Natalie’s mum is Tory to her core and given to bigoted outbursts about the failure of multiculturalism when she overdoes it on the Chardonnay, while Kash’s teenage daughter is growing increasingly more alienated and radical in her thinking.

While it seems incredibly convenient that so many contrasting issues and perspectives exist within the same family, again the writing keeps things from feeling overly neat.  Whenever the play threatens to get too polemical, Hollingworth diffuses things with humour and he does this to particularly strong effect in the monumental family bust-up that wraps up the first half. Clare Calbraith gives a layered performance as Natalie while Asif Khan nimbly switches between numerous characters, from a mouthy young lad at the mosque to a boarding school-educated Conservative bigwig who plummily labels his younger hijab-wearing colleague a ‘poster-girl.’

The play loses some of its delicacy in its later scenes and the plot developments become a little more predictable, but Indhu Rubasingham’s production is pacey and engaging, and the writing consistently smart, insightful, and, yes, relevant.