“Expendable” at Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Simon Jenner in West London
29 November 2024
For an unstated reason the press were quietly advised to use the back-row seats for the opening night of Emteaz Hussain’s Expendable at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs: peeled onions. It probably wasn’t intended as a metaphor, but I didn’t need onions to help moisten my eyes in this very touching account of two sisters meeting up again after some years with families and crises between them.
Lena Kaur and Humera Syed.
Photo credit: Isha Shah.
The 90-minute play directed by Esther Richardson is based around the 2008–11 Rochdale sexual grooming scandal involving white girls and predominantly Pakistani men. The scandal blatantly ignored the fact that the massive majority of groomers are still white males. Expendable asks what happens if just being of Pakistani heritage means you’re targeted, falsely accused, and in one case murdered? And what happens when just one of the groomers has entered your home briefly? The title though highlights that four of the five protagonists are women. When you protect the men at all costs, who also pays?
Here the fissures Expendable explores, as well as the outfall, are as gripping and contradictory as anything in Arthur Miller, or more recently Deborah Bruce’s superb Dixon and Daughters (which premiered at the National Theatre last year).
The setting of 2011 – in the northern town of Forestdale – is proclaimed in stencilled light on one of two end-walls in Azusa Ono’s neatly understated lighting design. Its shape reminds us that Upstairs is barn-like. Natasha Jenkins’ naturalistic set of a kitchen takes up the whole stage and the audience is horseshoed. This is as finely detailed a world as you might find in the Downstairs auditorium.
The kitchen is Zara’s. Avita Jay presents her two faces to the world: full of smiling care one moment, the next so anxious she ducks under the table when the bell rings. A young woman’s voice invokes terror. The unexpected arrival of elder sister Yasmin from Manchester (an alert, probing Lena Kaur) provokes a different, if edgy, welcome. Yasmin has a biracial son in a same-sex relationship she’s happy about. Long feeling pushed out by the Forestdale community, she’s forged a modern, independent life away from her past.
Kaur, like Jay having just stepped out of a major production closing less than a month ago, gives a superb performance. And since Yasmin takes the moral temperature rather than undergoes a fundamental transformation, the conviction she brings convinces us that Hussain can do something quite rare: bring life to a fundamentally unflawed character.
Trying to bridge the fissuring of their chosen lives between them, Yasmin discovers with each character alone or with others just what has been withheld. Though why has Yasmin’s son unfriended Zara’s? Both sisters try not to insist on answers, then confront each other. Nevertheless a revelation at the end to Zara’s son is an unexpected affirmation with a sucker-punch. It proves that every freedom Yasmin enjoys is based on something far deeper than simple observance. That, and Zara’s final line of the show are two of the most moving moments I’ve seen in theatre for a long time.
Jay expertly calibrates the zig-zag of Zara’s feelings: guarded joy, anxiety about both her children, her sister, and the fate of a once-close white girl; not to mention attending demonstrations against a hostile community and police brutality.
One detail pointedly parallels the events of August this year, when in the play (as in 2011) ten peaceful and innocent protesters including lecturers are banged up, whilst English Defence League fascists who hurled missiles are almost all let go. Yet recent far-right complaints of two-tier policing show little changes.
Zara’s son Raheel (glum, brooding Gurjeet Singh) as one of “The Forestdale Ten” has been falsely accused of being part of a grooming gang. Introverted, he nevertheless reveals a far more open attitude than his alert, tech-savvy sister; and a quickness to detect other kinds of insidious pressure. Singh’s understated performance glows with a filament of decision.
Though released, Raheel’s face is splashed across local rags and the subsequent apology tiny. The reason he was targeted though lies not just in protest but in something Zara unwittingly let happen. It impacts directly on Jade (Maya Bartley O’Dea’s desperately overcompensating brightness shrouding a bright heart) whom Zara is terrified of. Yet when in her absence Yasmin lets Jade in, she discovers these fears to be groundless. But there’s a rich flinch moment when Jade returns and (as usual, like a recurring joke) Zara leaps under the table like something out of Molière. This time she overhears what she needs to.
The way Hussain orchestrates this earns ringing laughter from the Upstairs audience. Anyone telling you this play is over-earnest must be blocking their ears. Though in the cringe stakes, the even funnier and touching “Back to Life” Mum dance at the end (Arun Ghosh’s sound design carefully gradates all sounds off) preludes a superb denouement.
Hussain upends expectations, crafting tensions throughout. Whilst Raheel is brooding, he’s more “woke” than his hashtag-twitching sibling. Zara’s earnest activist daughter Sofia (Humera Syed, blazing with prim, wide-eyed outrage) has been turned against her own best interests. She uses then-fresh terms like “othering”, wields platforms like turntables. Yet an uncle with his New Dawn movement has etched into Sofia’s sense of priorities men’s needs first, and women subordinating everything to those.
Hussain memorably cross-hatches Sofia’s confusions. “What’s the point of going to a uni full of drunk people?” Yasmin challenges her with a charged slap-down on women’s roles: “Believe me, Sofia, being drunk doesn’t discriminate … I can vouch for that.” Nevertheless, though Sofia might have been subtly manipulated she’s not wrong about racism and fightback: “People keep saying there’s no smoke without fire, but it’s not our fire is it, khala? It’s like we’re choking on all the fumes.”
Expendable is more than a first-rate, durable play. It asks questions of several communities, explores tensions even progressive Muslims face, and with Giant affirms the Royal Court is back with plays that need to be seen everywhere.
