In Stephen Karam’s queasy American tragicomedy, a hard-done-by Lebanese-American family in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, is the vehicle for an exploration of different forms of pain, from physical agony to grief. It’s the first opening at Hampstead since its Arts Council England grant was axed and epitomises the problems this theatre has in defining its mission to promote new writing.
Sons of the Prophet is, quite simply, not very good. The characters are self-consciously quirky, the situations forced, the supposed darkness of the wit overdone. Bijan Sheibani’s production cultivates an appealing, rambly naturalism and has a beautifully understated central performance from Irfan Shamji. But still, the 100-minute running time drags.
Shamji plays Joseph Douaihy, a high school runner crippled by chronic pain at 29 and working for Gloria, a needy but insensitive book packager (an outsourced form of publishing) because she pays for his health insurance. Joseph’s father dies following a car crash caused by a college footballer’s prank and his incontinent, emphysemic and offensively old-fashioned uncle Bill moves in.
The family is supposedly descended from Lebanese-French knights and the platitudinous writer Khalil Gibran: chapter headings from Gibran’s fatuous bestseller The Prophet are projected above each new scene. But Joseph and his younger brother Charles (who was born with one ear and can identify any country by its shape) are both gay, so Uncle Bill considers the family line doomed.
New Yorker Gloria, who mostly tries to inflict unwanted confidences about her husband’s suicide and her hysterectomy on Joseph, scents a possible bestseller in his family’s history. A privileged, white local journalist reporting on the car crash turns out to be gay and the footballer, who seeks to atone for his actions but also dodge the consequences, is of mixed heritage and hot. You see what I mean about the play being contrived?
It’s also not new. Karam won a Tony Award for his fine 2015 drama The Humans, which transferred to Hampstead with an intact Broadway cast in 2018. Sons of the Prophet dates from 2011 and is a much lumpier and more self-invading example of what the author calls “emotional autobiography”. It received a Pulitzer Prize nomination but those are handed out like Smarties at a children’s’ party, frankly. The play fits into a well-established strand of American theatre writing that confuses mawkishness with empathy.
Sheibani’s production ambles along pleasantly and is succinctly designed by Samal Blak until it awkwardly breaks the fourth wall. But every character should match the downbeat naturalness of Shamji’s Joseph, and instead they’re mostly garish cartoons. On a deeper level, while the play may have novelty value for London audiences, it doesn’t count as exciting new work by any other metric.
Hampstead Theatre’s artistic director Roxana Silbert announced her resignation when ACE’s £766,455 grant was withdrawn and warned that the venue could no longer commit to exclusively promoting new writing. A new announcement on Monday seemed partially to contradict that. Either way, will we notice?
After lockdown, Hampstead proceeded with the programme of revivals planned for its 60th anniversary in 2019. Most of the new works it has staged since then have been disappointing and lacking in dramaturgical input.
In this year’s 66th Evening Standard Theatre Awards Hampstead got one nomination – for established director Katie Mitchell – and saw its reputation as a seedbed for exciting work comprehensively stolen by the Bush Theatre and the Young Vic. It’s not enough for plays to be “new”. They also need to be good.
