Theatre night:Out of Sorts.

My ticket for my first ever visit to Theatre503, above The Latchmere pub near Battersea Park, cost me just 50p (it was pay what you like, and I'm not very flush right now). That was less than the price of the bottle of Evian I took in with me to drink during the play. It was more than value for money because Out of Sorts (written by Danusia Samal and directed by Tanuja Amarasuriya) was way better than other recent, more expensive plays, I'd seen. Better by far. It was, in fact, one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had at the theatre.

Its basic premise is that Zara (Nalan Burgess), a young lawyer, has been walking a precarious tightrope between two very different lives. With her parents, she's a good Muslim daughter who prays, doesn't drink, and is preparing to marry childhood friend Jamil (spoken of, but never seen). In her own home, the one she shares with her friend Alice (Emma Denly), she certainly drinks and she definitely doesn't pray - or even believe. Regularly committing acts that Alice gleefully points out are haram.

Despite being attractive, friendly, clever, and kind it becomes clear that not all is well with Zara. At first it seems she's just stressed at having to live a lie and, once she's told Jamil the wedding won't be happening, keeping that from her family makes her even more worried. Soon, however, it becomes clear that there's more going in Zara's life than the surface allows us to see. Pleasing her parents while also living a hard drinking, partying, millennial lifestyle is difficult, sure, but Zara's character is drawn in much more humanistic turns than that.

She's got those problems - but she's got a lot of other stuff, all too human and all too recognisable, going on as well. The appurtenances of the play are all very much the milieu of millennials (veganism, smashed avo on toast, status anxiety, hipster cafes, and wokeness) but these are just the on-trend clothes that this well built body of work chooses to wear.

 

They're window dressing for a story about much more important, much deeper, things and it's to the credit of writer, director, and a superb cast that during a running length just shy of two hours they manage to tackle issues of race, belonging, cultural appropriation, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, friendship, and love without ever shoehorning anything in.

Nothing feels forced. Nothing feels perfunctory. There's a flow in the writing, and in the performances, that makes Out of Sorts as easy to watch as, but far better written than, a soap opera. None of the characters are 'types' or have been included to represent anything other than rounded out, fully formed, believable people that you could quite easily imagine yourself meeting. They all felt like, talked like, and spoke like people you probably know - and, because of that, you couldn't help but care what happened to them.

Zara's flatmate and friend Alice is the daughter of rich parents who's been given a lot of help in life and had a lot of advantages. She understands the concept of white privilege but can barely recognise she's benefited from it. She means well and she tries hard to be 'woke' but often veers into dubious territory. We forgive her, like we do Zara her indiscretions, because she is still young.

Alice justifies her overuse of the word 'haram' and doing Arabic accents to impersonate Zara's parents on the basis that her best friend is a Muslim and her boyfriend, Anthony (Claudius Peters), is black. Peters is superb as Anthony, a Brummie with Nigerian heritage who stands very much as the voice of reason in the play. Turning up at an ill advised 'white trash' party (one of Alice's ideas of course) in his suit from work, it's guessed he's come as Obama but he gets the last laugh by holding his red tie out and suggesting Trump to be far more suitable of the awful white trash moniker!

Anthony's seen racism all his life and even remarks that now, as an adult, and an adult in a suit no less, he's still accused by newsagents of being a thief. Zara's dad Hussein (Nayef Rashed) has also in the past been, and is still being, targeted by racists but, in one of those acts of cognitive dissonance we so easily see in others but often fail to see in ourselves, he too holds some racist views about black people.

Like many a dad of his generation, sadly! Other than that he's a loving father. A cab driver with an expanding waistband who loves, and is loved by, his family. Zara's mother Layla (Myriam Acharki) is a stoic, suffering, caring provider who always puts her family before herself and is quick to offer help and very slow to judge.

Sister Fatima (Oznur Cifci) has not gained that level of patience or wisdom yet. A hip-hop/R&B fan with pretensions towards poetry and a delightfully potty mouth, she speaks as if she grew up in Compton rather than the London Borough of Brent and has come to radical decisions about white British oppressors and supremacists.

Understandable decisions when you consider how much power white supremacists hold and how much of the narrative they dictate. But Fatima, too, is shown to have bought into an aggressive belief system. Her genuine acts of kindness towards her family indicate that she is simply a young person making her way in a world that's both confusing and one in which the odds are stacked against her from the start.

The odd Trump joke aside, the politics are delivered with a lower case p. There's not an overt political message, there's no hectoring, nobody learns an important life lesson. People just get on with their lives, they fall out, they make up, they make mistakes, they try to remedy those mistakes. It's funny in places (there was even a food fight) and, at other times, it's painfully sad. Tears came to me more than once.

With a small stage set representing Zara's front room on one side and that of her family on the other, all the expense has clearly gone into the story and finding the right people to flesh that story out. Which Samal and Amarasuriya have managed fantastically. Rashed, Denly, Cifci, and Peters are all superb and when Aharki is on stage she has a presence that mesmerises, but most credit must go to Nalan Burgess as Zara.

On stage almost constantly and yet able to, in less than one hundred and twenty minutes and in a story set over just one day, give her character depth, vulnerability, a complicated back story and so much more beside. When she was happy you were happy for her. When she wasn't you wanted to reach out and hug her.

Out of Sorts, while making salient points about big issues which all hit their targets, was ultimately a drama about the complicated bonds of family and friendship. It was ultimately about the healing power of love in all of its many guises. I was so gripped by this masterpiece that I didn't take one single sip from that bottle of Evian. This play deserves a much much larger stage and I'm happy to say that, if it gets that stage, I'd be willing to pay up to forty times as much to see it next time. I walked away inspired.