The Westbridge – review

A couple of years ago, I sat in on a workshop for young Muslim writers offered as part of the Royal Court's Unheard Voices programme . Out of that came this first play by Rachel De-lahay being presented in the bustling Bussey Building in London's Peckham before moving to the Theatre Upstairs. And it makes for a lively, vigorous evening even if the production, which seats the audience in the middle of a large, rectangular space, sometimes leads to tennis-neck. De-lahay has confronted a living issue: the tensions between black and Asian people living on a big Battersea estate. What sparks the crisis is the purported rape of a 14-year-old Asian girl by a black gang. This not only triggers local riots, but exposes the fissures in the relationship between the Pakistani Soriya and the African-Caribbean Marcus, who are of mixed-race parentage and have just moved in together. To complicate matters further, Soriya is torn between her lover and her white, flat-sharing, female best friend who goes by the name of George. Too much plot is thrown into the pot; and I'm surprised that an intelligent woman like Soriya should be perturbed by an old biddy who tells her that "Asian girls should be for Asian men". But De-lahay captures excellently the confusion of cultural identity in the modern world. Soriya may come from a Muslim family, but is a secularised clubber. Her boyfriend laughingly spurns the idea that he wants recipes from the Reggae Reggae Cookbook . Even white George claims to be more "street" than any Caribbean brother from the estate. In short, the play's message is that the old racial categories today make little sense; and, even if Clint Dyer 's production is a bit hectic, Chetna Pandya as Soriya, Ray Panthaki as her brother and Fraser Ayres as her lover put De-lahay's ideas across with enormous style. Michael Billington