Multitudes **

Tricycle Theatre, London

EXCERPT: "John Hollingsworth's Multitudes is a script simply overladen with flaws. It presents us with situations and responses that feel fundamentally untruthful; it is exposition-heavy, full of stereotypes, lacks nuance, and is predictable. "

Summary

Bradford.  On the eve of a Conservative Party Conference the country is in turmoil and one of its most multicultural cities awaits a visit from the Prime Minister. Kash, a liberal British Muslim, prepares his address to politicians about the state of the nation. His girlfriend Natalie, a recent convert to Islam, cooks for anti-war protesters gathered at the Town Hall. Lyn, her mother, moans to anyone who’ll listen about the decline of her cherished England.  It’s all too much for Kash’s daughter Qadira, who begins to plan a radical intervention. As the nation questions immigration policies and military support in the Middle East, one family face their own internal conflict of faith, belonging, and who gets to call themselves British.

Thoughts

John Hollingsworth's Multitudes is a script simply overladen with flaws. It presents us with situations and responses that feel fundamentally untruthful; it is exposition-heavy, full of stereotypes, lacks nuance, and is predictable. It is immensely frustrating to watch. Spot the Conservative bigot, the disenchanted young teenage radical rebelling against her 'coconut' father. With rant after rant, so much of it begins to feel crude and unsophisticated that the whole experience becomes very tiresome. 

There were moments that were much better: at the start, Hollingsworth's acting background manifests itself in a fairly good grasp of witty declarative speech. Towards the end, it is genuinely thought provoking when Natalie has to come to terms with the fact she is being treated differently as an Islam convert who wears a headscarf. It is true that, as a majority, we rarely interrogate how our appearance informs how people treat us, or how that might change if we wore a hijab, say. And the play's concluding image - with three of them unified through prayer - is a really hopeful and powerful message about the healing power of prayer. In its favour, too, the play is fairly dramatic and carries you along for the story - and Indhu Rubasingham has done a good job at keeping scene changes efficiently snappy (in a way that feels like it might be becoming something of a house style). 

However, these positives cannot dispel the intense frustration I felt at wasted opportunities. Hollingsworth has speeches that he wants his characters to say, and weaknesses he wants them to show, but he doesn't create situations that would credibly draw them out. And when he does have dramatic circumstances there, ready for the exploiting, like when they're all at the hospital because Kash's daughter Qadira's attempt to protest at her dad's speech blew up in her face (literally), there is so little humanity shown by them all that the whole episode - and play - becomes something to dismiss out of hand, rather than an intelligent or insightful examination of the problems that are indeed facing our country. 

This is a play by a writer who knows how to write agonised speeches that actors would like to perform, and one directed and programmed in by a theatre that has a box-ticking agenda to produce a certain kind of play (i.e. one with an international / British focus that ideally raises the number of BAME performers). And there's a chance that that's enough: that there may be some middle class middle aged twat sitting in the audience who recognises more of him or herself than they'd like to see in the racist and ghastly Lyn figure, who will perhaps see themselves anew and not like it. But for the rest, it's surely preaching to the converted, and in a particularly unsophisticated way.