Review: THE REAL ONES, Bush Theatre

At once intimate and expansive, The Real Ones follows the friendship of Zaid and Neelam from age nineteen to thirty-six. Once kindred spirits, moving in sync, they fall out of step when the harsh reality of adult life sends them in different directions. Waleed Akhtar (Olivier winner for The P Word) pens a sharply observed look into whether platonic love can last.

We meet Zaid (Nathaniel Curtis) and Neelam (Mariam Haque) as nineteen-year-old uni students, dancing to a banging British indie soundtrack. Both come from British-Pakistani Muslim families, and both have hopes of becoming playwrights, but Zaid is gay and Neelam is straight. As the years pass, Neelam chooses a more traditional life, settling down with her  Deji (Nnabiko Ejimofor), while Zaid keeps trying to make it in theatre, and starts a relationship with his much older lecturer, Jeremy (Anthony Howell). Despite their opposing paths, both find themselves facing challenges with their families: Neelam’s family are disappointed in her for marrying a non-Muslim, Black man, and Zaid spends years hiding his sexuality from his parents. We follow the pair through almost twenty years, in a mosaic of moments of their lives. 

The first few chapters of The Real Ones are electric. Combining pulsating club scenes with astute, laugh-out-loud conversations about gay and straight people, old school friends having children, and uni gossip, it’s theatrical magic. Perfectly paced, the production quickly builds a believable close friendship, complete with in-jokes and recurring points of contention. Akhtar’s writing is precise and vulnerable, as well as vastly relatable to anyone who has experienced being young and queer, young and non-white, or just young and dissatisfied with adulthood.

As the tone darkens and the pace slows, Neelam and Zaid’s lives get more complicated – or as the characters say, life comes for them. Akhtar tackles a whole host of life challenges face-on, ranging from age-gap relationships and interracial marriage to motherhood to racism in the theatre industry. Really, this is a play about life – about all the highs and lows of moving into adulthood. 

The play is also interspersed with flashbacks to one core memory, of the pair dancing in a club, yelling "I love you"s to each other over the music. This memory slowly blurs and fades over time – while this is an effective device, it gets somewhat lost as the play progresses. Its impact is felt more in the printed script, where blackout lines are used to highlight the missing dialogue. 

Curtis (It’s A Sin) is believable and fun to watch as awkward, ambitious Zaid, portraying the character’s youthful warmth and eventual petulance and naivety equally well. Haque more than matches him as down-to-earth, witty Neelam, impressively shifting from a chatty late teen to a grounded thirty-something mother. They are well supported by Ejimofor and Howell, who both give committed, engaging performances despite having less to work with. The chemistry between Zaid and Neelam, as well as with their respective love interests, is believable, although the romantic pairings could perhaps do with a little more spark from time to time. 

Frustratingly, The Real Ones begins to lose its way around two thirds in. At this point, all four characters and their dynamics have been established and explored, and it’s become fairly clear where each of them is headed. It then feels as though the play isn’t sure which way to turn: there are fewer laughs and more arguments, and the points of conflict start to cycle around without really progressing. What makes the show tick – the specificity of being British-Pakistani and of being queer, the central friendship, the pace and humour – all begin to fade away. The Real Ones also ends on an unexpectedly sombre note – while there’s nothing wrong with a show not having a happy ending, it feels like the length and complexity of  the play has earned a little more payoff. 

The combination of Anthony Simpson-Pike’s deceptively simple direction and Anisha Fields’ blue, circular set makes for a slick and stylish production. An absence of visually specific settings helps to keep the focus on the relationship dynamics at play, and the conversation pit-style centre allows characters to smoothly step in and out of scenes. Meanwhile, Xana’s music and sound design, and Christopher Nairne’s lighting bring some real edge to the recurring club scenes, with beats and strobes that gradually shift from thrilling to threatening. 

When it’s good, The Real Ones is really, really good. Akhtar writes accurately and perceptively about the friendships gay men have with women, with uncanny realism and laugh-out-loud humour. The Real Ones is a warm and thought-provoking story of platonic love and coming of age, both specific and universal. In spite of an overly long run time and a plot that gets a little lost along the way, this remains an impactful, relatable play from a very exciting writer. 

Image Credit: Helen Murray

The Real Ones runs at the Bush Theatre until 26 September