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Aching affairs of the heart
Adam Samuel-Bal as Sully and Krupa Pattani as Caneze. Pictures: Robert Day BloodCoventry Belgrade, B2
**** BLOOD, they say, is thicker than water.
It’s a theme that comes round repeatedly in Emteaz Hussain’s compact
two-actor play. But, we learn gradually, family can mean anything
from wisdom and old wives’ tales, well-meaning aunts and concerned
siblings, to restrictiveness, cruelty, assault and sheer brutality. Caneze and Sully (Suleiman), in their end teens
or more likely early 20s, have met each other in a college canteen. It’s
the one good thing that happens in college, which she finds unbelievably
tedious, making ‘inept well-meaning conversation’, while he is more than
unhappy with the lower grade work he is forced to do, and living ‘in
this godforsaken backwater’. They are, in fact a couple made for each other:
dissatisfied, essentially lonely without one another, viewing things
around them as ‘shit’, yet joyous and upbeat and optimistic when they
have each other to turn to. Things suddenly go wrong when he leaves to
find better work in Pakistan (‘peoples have different worlds they step
in and out of and I is no different’). Their subsequent – almost
inevitable - reconciliation is touching. The first aspect to applaud is the lights: Sara
Perks’s finely designed rear stage set, a sort of formal cluster of
transparent boxes as appealing as some Bauhaus house design, is turned
by Aideen Malone’s lighting into a feast of invention. Lit from rear, in ice blue, purple, orange,
green, yellow and other hues, they constantly add something to the
action, and feel apt and relevant, not just gratuitous. The effect is slightly kaleidoscopic, and
genuinely beautiful. All the more surprise that the colour which impacts
most strongly at one juncture is plain white. The lights’ timing and
switching was perfect; and suited the Belgrade B1 space ideally: quite a
tricky and challenging lighting plot to get right. There’s a musical score running nearly
throughout, by Arun Ghosh, which really has the same effect too: it’s
plaintive, touching, sometimes sustaining and reassuring, only
occasionally tense or irritable. Sometimes Ghosh keeps it almost
subliminal, so you only just sense it in the background. It is not
insistently Islamic at all, though there is an undertow of Indian
subcontinent music which is hug The two young actors are Krupa Pattani (as the
girl Caneze) and Adam Samuel-Bal, who plays Sully. They are both an
absolute treat. They handle a lengthy script effortlessly without a hint
of a prompt. Their great art is to make their characters so ordinary,
humble almost, and yet register so strongly and attractively.
They are feeling their way in the world –
essentially a Midlands Pakistani community. Their simplicity features in
many ways – his obsession with half a chicken at Nando’s, for instance,
which emerges at their first meeting (she however is vegetarian). Emteaz Hussain has maintained the variety by
inserting a series of soliloquies to break up the couple’s dialogue. At
times, certain passages almost feel like Greek Tragedy. There is a
special poetry to Sully’s rapture over a full moon, another effect
splendidly lit by Aideen Malone. Caneze is more assertive, perhaps the stronger:
she rhapsodizes innocently over a vision of marriage. She urges herself
to organise her studying better. But more feistily, ‘There isn’t just
one way to Allah, like most of the stupid people here think. I’m going
to God in my own way’. She sees formal Islamic attire as ‘a rip-off’. Perhaps her most significant assertion is
‘Sometimes when I’m with Sully I feel strangely free.’ Freedom to be
themselves, indeed freedom from family, is what both are striving
and yearning for. That, presumably, is the most significant reason why
after he takes off to Pakistan and works, it seems, in a travel and
airline office, she – after an initial pouty rejection – welcomes him
back. They both are each other’s route to freedom. When they kiss, as they finally do from halfway
through the first half, there is a real tenderness. A beauty, in fact.
There is also silence: Director Esther Richardson is particularly
sensitive in calibrating the volume: their exchanges are finely
modulated. There is scarcely a raised voice in the whole production, yet
every word is beautifully clear and audible. She is also skilled at
managing what in music would be called ritenuti: a structured
slowing down at the end of a sentence, which gives the final words,
especially Caneze’s, added impact. Every word the pair utters, whether
alone or together, one could fairly call empathetic. There’s a witty exchange for Sully when he’s
being lectured by an unavoidable aunt: family know what’s best for him,
they insist; he knows otherwise, but seeks not to be hurtful in his
response. After all, as Caneze repeats paradoxically, ‘If you don’t have
family, what have you got?’ There are some hearty laughs to cheer an
attentive audience. To make a change they sit together in a
hubble-bubble tea bar. Sully, raising a few pounds by working, says
‘They even let be do a bit of cooking’. But there are aches and pains on the way. Even as
we build to the prospect of a wedding possibly – just maybe - taking
place, the importance of trust is powerful. ‘It’s like you don’t trust
me’. The events in the play are when Caneze cuts one of her wrists – not
very seriously it seems, but a call for attention. We got a hint of this at the start, where she
said (without punctuation), ‘It’s juss my own flesh and blood it doesn’t
make sense if I cut it and it bleeds it makes sense I half expect not to
bleed.’ And – a real shock this – we learn that her
brother Yusuf, seeking to maintain the family rights over his sister,
rapes her. It’s simply enacted, the wrongdoer is not seen, but she is
patently violated: and one of the points at which the vulnerability of
this duo becomes most patent. When someone tries to break into their home and
haven – it turns out to be a false alarm - Sully’s knife-bearing
nervousness, indeed terror – will he be called on to kill? – was moving.
‘Just the wind’, she says: the wind which blows them – who knows where
next? But perhaps there’s a feeling the wind may blow them good, and is
not after all remain an ill wind. To 11-04-15 Roderic Dunnett
11-04-15
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ely
affecting. It would have been easy to overdo this aspect. Part of the
great success of the show is that it never does so.