Theatre

How cheering Hanif Kureishi’s adaptation of his second novel should have been. Life is hard now but 1989 was worse: no fatwas currently plague famous Western writers and at least we’ve got rid of Thatcher and Bananarama. But this is neither a careful scrutiny of Muslim fundamentalism’s recent past nor an intelligent comment on its present. Despite its university setting and abundance of sex, drugs and racist-bashing, Kureishi’s play lacks something neither students nor fundamentalists are in want of: conviction.

Student Shahid (Jonathan Bonnici) finds time, between shagging his lecturer and trying to avoid his nutty brother Chili, to get embroiled with Muslim hardliners just as the ‘Satanic Verses’ controversy erupts. Shahid’s dilemmas are genuinely agonising: religion or love? Home or the wide world? Class consciousness or the solitary writer’s life? But none of them seems to distress him properly, so they’re hardly likely to upset the audience. And upsetting people is Kureishi’s gift. His dialogue still sparks (‘We’re not bloody Christians! We don’t turn the other buttock!’) but it sets nothing alight. Nothing feels true or, more worryingly for a play about racism, has consequences. In contrast to the vibrant set, with its funky projections, the so-called action looks as flat as an Athena poster. We’re left hankering for more sightings of Chili and his glamorous wife. Given that they are the play’s raging materialists, this suggests that Kureishi’s attempt to put religious politics centre stage is a failure.