The drama unfolds in a kitchen and never ventures out. It is 2011 and inside, a Muslim mother is holed up, too scared to go out. Beyond her front door, the Asian community is under violent siege after a local newspaper features a lineup of British Pakistani men suspected of being part of a grooming gang.
Inspired by the recent, real-life news headlines of the child grooming rings in the north of England, Emteaz Hussain’s play offers a female take on the fallout, from how an entire community becomes targeted to how women are silenced, and who, when they raise their voices about misogyny, fear being accused of betraying an already beleaguered community. But after laying down the ground for dramatising these promising themes, the play does not do nearly enough to reckon with them.
Zara (Avita Jay) is the mother who has retreated to her kitchen after her son, Raheel (Gurjeet Singh), is wrongly accused of grooming. Her estranged sister, Yasmin (Lena Kaur), drops in just as racist EDL protests are mobilising alongside counter-protests by Muslim men from other areas who have elected themselves leaders and mouthpieces for this community.
The family here represents the innocents caught within the hate and hysteria, and it attempts to grapple not only with this central issue but also that of the moral policing by and within this Asian community itself. Questions, too many questions, arise around faith, secular life choices, homophobia, internalised Islamophobia and trial by media as well as misogyny.
The setup itself is promising: the sisters often cook as they talk, and there is the drifting smell of their pizzas baking in the oven. Raheel, when he creeps in, is almost ghost-like in his state of shock and fear. The sisters weave Urdu into English as they speak and have the prickly, push-pull of intimacy and grudge-bearing of siblings while Zara’s daughter, Sofia (Humera Syed), is a fired-up online activist in the making.
But a strangely confusing plot unfolds, with reports of various characters, some named and others simply called uncles or aunts, off-stage. There are phone calls and texts delivering information too, and carrying only one side of the dialogue. The central reveal is truncated and does not create the horror it should. When Jade (Maya Bartley O’Dea), a young white victim of sexual grooming enters, she seems like a functionary, delivering information, and we glean brief, confusing, hints of her story. One side-plot features a gay Muslim man, again off-stage, and it is moving but covered hastily, without the space it deserves, in a phone call.
Under the direction of Esther Richardson, there is much speaking aloud of the themes which in themselves are important ones, very much of our times, but they are waiting to be built upon by the drama.
• At Royal Court theatre, London, until 21 December
