Multitudes review, Tricycle Theatre

In my GP surgery I've sat with niqabed women eyes barely visible, making assumptions about their provenance and susceptibility, and almost jumped out of my skin when they've loudly admonished their children with voices and a vocabulary that's pure Little Britain. It is this richness of the muslim experience and the misconceptions of those looking in that John Hollingsworth explores in his gem of a play, Multitudes. It is funny and sharp and poignant in a week where commentators have asked why bright young British girls would go to Syria to be the chattels of violent strangers. Hollingsworth doesn't square that circle, he turns the circle into a pie and slices it up so we can chew on the layers that inform present tensions.

Set on the eve of a Tory Party conference in Bradford the narrative centres on local councillor Kash - brilliant Navin Chowdhury - and his English partner Nat. There's a muslim women's anti-war protest outside the conference centre. While Kash grapples with the public order problem, Nat converts to Islam without warning him. He'd been hoping for a parliamentary nomination. What now? His constituents will think he coerced her into converting, and his community will expect marriage as she's become an observant muslim. Meanwhile, as he works to restore calm in the city, his potential mother-in-law, the Tory grandee Lyn, is driven to drink and despair by Nat's conversion and lets loose a shocking diatribe. She isn't the only one who feels her identity is compromised by multiculturalism. Soon after, Kash's 18-year-old daughter Qadira, an emo in a hijab, carries out an act of Islamist defiance that nobody saw coming.

What works well in Multitudes is that Hollingsworth creates a recognisable scenario: families struggling to manage oppositional personalities, cultural expectations, and belief systems, but somehow muddling along. Their cheek by jowl lives reach a point of critical mass with the arrival of the Tory set, which is also muslim and very funny. The arguments in Multitudes are well rehearsed. What's different is having them all in one place. It stops being about goodies and baddies and become about everyday misunderstandings between people that, without mitigation, escalate and isolate.

In conclusion: Multitudes is highly entertaining under Indhu Rubasingham's direction. The cast is terrific. Clare Galbraith is the pious Natalie, Jacqueline King her fiery mother, and Salma Hoque's Qadira is a sad reminder of our missing UK schoolgirls. Asif Khan and Maya Sondhi perform lightening changes and provide wonderful comic turns across the piece.

References
Multitudes, Tickets

Tricycle Theatre, 269 Kilburn High Road, London NW6 7JR    Run ends March 21