Romantic love is a road well travelled by storytellers, but what about its platonic counterpart? Olivier Award-winning playwright Waleed Akhtar seeks to shine a light on the similarly turbulent and complex dynamics within friendship in his new play The Real Ones, currently playing at Bush Theatre until 26th October.
Set across a period of almost two decades, we encounter British-Pakistani best friends Zaid (Nathaniel Curtis) and Neelam (Mariam Haque) at various critical moments in their lives — and in their friendship — as they deal with growing up, family tensions, relationships, and identity.
Closeted Zaid has his heart fervently set on becoming a playwright, and he’s also navigating his place in the world as a gay Pakistaniakistani man. Having developed a complex relationship with sex and romance as a teenager, he also finds himself in a tricky on-off relationship with Jeremy (Anthony Howell), a white older lecturer on his post-graduate degree.
Straight-talking Neelam initially shares Zaid’s dream of theatrical stardom, and the pair pick up soul-destroying shifts at their local cinema and a call centre to try and get to where they want to be. But, after an experience that convinces her she’ll never be able to bring her own perspective to the stage without filtering it for a white audience, Neelam’s passion dwindles and she decides to pursue a new, stable career and a family with British-Nigerian lawyer Deji (Nnabiko Ejimofor) — much to anti-traditionalist Zaid’s indignation.
The two leads offer a sturdy anchor for a play that sometimes finds itself floundering. Curtis brings a boyish charm to a character that can become frustrating as he seems to get older without really getting wiser. Neelam is a much more well-rounded character and given extra depth through Haque’s delicate performance, but the wedge that’s driven between the pair when she starts a family feels larger than it should be for such seemingly close friends. I struggled to believe that two people who have been best friends for 18 years could possibly be driven apart so easily and so quickly.
As for the pacing of The Real Ones, a two-hour play with no interval will always present something of a challenge in terms of capturing an audience’s attention, and this show unfortunately doesn’t overcome this hurdle. The play as a whole feels somehow both bloated and rushed, squeezing in a huge number of scenes without always giving the most emotionally weighty moments enough time to sit with the audience and pack an emotional punch.
The scenes of tension and conflict between Zaid and Neelam are carefully written and directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike, but the moments that show their friendship at its strongest are few and far between, making the actors’ natural chemistry flatline and their eventual separation feel less emotive than it ought to.
While most of the play is performed naturalistically, sometimes the transitions between scenes can feel clumsy or erratic. A recurring tableau of the two dancing on a night out and expressing their love, for instance, began to feel repetitive rather than poignant.
There are also some confusing production choices peppered throughout, like sudden lighting changes mid-dialogue or the use of a smoke machine which serves to cover up the emotions on the actors’ faces rather than heighten them.
The set is simple, comprising a dipped stage and a few moving chairs, but it allows the actors to expand and transform in the space and frames the conversational dialogue nicely.
Alongside Curtis and Haque, the supporting cast help to elevate the weaker elements of the material. Ejimofor is sturdy and confident as Deji, while Howell embodies the supportive but ultimately unattainable Jeremy with ease.
The racial dynamics explored within the two romantic couples (and within Neelam and Zaid’s interactions within their own worlds) add an engaging level of nuance that the central friendship occasionally lacks. Neelam and Deji in particular have some of the most affecting scenes of conflict, centred around her concerns about bringing a non-Muslim into her strict Muslim family.
The Real Ones’s title comes from the duo’s insistence that their friendship must be one of full transparency. But if I’m to be brutally real about this production, its lengthy runtime and sticky pacing left me feeling nonplussed about what could have been a powerful exploration of platonic love.
Reviewer: Olivia Cox
Reviewed: 24th September 2024
North West End UK Rating: