Review: DUCK, Arcola Theatre

We’ve all known kids like Ismail “Smiley” Akhtar - bright, enthusiastic to the point of irritation, but charming too. Hell, some of us even were that kid. He’s turning 15 years old in 2005, obsessed with cricket and far too excited about his precocious talent earning him a call-up to the First XI, the big boys team. Hell, I was that kid too!

But Smiley has a problem (well, it’s not his problem of course) that I never had - and it’s a problem that has been tearing cricket apart for years culminating in a coruscating report published last Tuesday that will change the game forever. It may have taken 18 years, but we can have genuine hope that the Smileys of the future will not suffer his indignities.

Before such matters bubble to the surface in the narrative, Maatin’s new play is a delightful comedy played winningly by Omar Bynon, who not only talks like a cricketer (props for the stresses in his pronunciation of Tendulkar) but moves like one too, playing shots with balance and perfectly catching the panic and the pain of having to wear the team box. On stage for the full 85 minutes running time, Bynon is kept on the move by director, Imy Wyatt Corner, and his extraordinary mobile face, that of a natural clown, keeps us transfixed on Smiley’s growing pains.  

There’s elements too of Jack Rosenthal’s landmark TV film for Channel Four, P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang, which also featured a nervous teen in a coming of age story whose interior life was mediated by cricket commentators. If you liked that, you’ll like this.

But it’s 2023 not 1982 and life is more complicated for Smiley than it was for Alan Duckworth. He’s at a private school (easy to identify for those ITK) and he’s becoming aware of class distinctions, but he’s also experiencing the bitter taste of othering, the means by which those in power protect it by diminishing those without it.  

Initially, it’s because he’s the new kid on the block, the favoured one who needs taking down a rung or two. Then a teacher sees not the boy, but the Asian (though he calls him “Boy”) the master reaching for the laziest stereotypes wilfully hurting the kid. Smiley also learns of the notorious Tebbit test of the 1980s, the Tory politician’s question designed to corral British people with Commonwealth heritage into two camps: those who supported England at the cricket (good) and those who supported the team of their fathers and grandfathers (bad). It was cruel and crass at the time and laughable now - or would be if its echoes were not heard on the playing fields of England to this very day. Racism, as ever, comes with many faces.

We get an early indication of a key theme when Smiley explains how he first picked up a bat left-handed but switched to right in order to fit in - the pick-up never felt comfortable, though he got along okay, neither entirely on one side nor the other. At the end of the play’s timeline (the summer of 7/7 and an Ashes triumph for the ages) he finds a psychological home that works for him, cheering on Freddie Flintoff and co on the victory parade and playing his weekend matches for a majority South Asian team. 

There’s much to be learned from both a universal story of the transition to adulthood and a specific story of how multicultural identities are not just useful, but necessary - Smiley is British, Asian and Muslim and he doesn’t need to explain it to anyone. That the play is so entertaining yet hits hard when it needs to, is a testament to a writer, actor and director who know how to tell a an engaging story and how to make a message stick. 

Well batted everyone.

Duck is at the Arcola Theatre until 15 July

Photo Credit: Isha Shah    

 

  

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