Tag Archives: Suzi Corker

Favour

Favour

★★★★

Bush Theatre

Favour

Favour

Bush Theatre

Reviewed – 30th June 2022

★★★★

 

“a sharp and emotionally impactful piece of work”

 

Favour, a new co-production between The Bush Theatre and Clean Break written by Ambreen Razia, is a tight and heartfelt drama following a working-class Muslim family in East London. It deftly engages with sweeping themes of addiction and its manifestation, mental illness and its effects on parenting, and the connections between social marginalization and the criminal justice system, at the granular and interpersonal level.

The play understands the notion of retributive justice not simply as a harmful status quo that is enforced by the criminal justice system, but as a social norm that bleeds into our familial relationships.

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Aleena returns from prison to her mother Noor and daughter Leila. She quarrels with Noor over the way she ought to reintegrate with society, and is more permissive with Leila as she attempts to reclaim her role as primary parent, leading to a conflict of authority. As tensions build, doubt is cast on Aleena’s ability to parent, as well as the circumstances of her incarceration. Though Favour’s plot has its twists and turns, the play is driven chiefly by its layered characters and their complex relationships.

Leila is on the precipice of figuring out what she wants from her life and the people in it. In the hands of Ashna Rabheru, she is equally timid and expressive. Leila is comfortable in the world that her Grandmother, Noor, has built for her—her school, her masjid, the rituals of Islam—even though she bristles with it at times. Simultaneously, she is drawn to the visible affection her mother shows her. Most of all, Leila has not yet discarded the urge to please the people she cares about the most, at the expense of her own wants and needs.

Noor understands and meets Leila’s needs as best as she can, but is followed by a spectre of shame and judgement cast by her surrounding community. Throughout the course of the play, she feels equally motivated by that shame and genuine concern for Leila’s wellbeing. She has a penchant for tradition and order, though she seems to privately understand their pitfalls. Renu Brindle plays Noor with lived-in nuance.

Aleena rages at the same community, their judgement and hypocrisy, at a mother who is unable to show her affection, at the clutches of the carceral state that hold on even after her release from prison. Aleena’s wit is biting and acerbic, though not always well-aimed, and Avita Jay brings her to life with boundless energy and verve. Amid her sharp perception, Aleena often cannot see past her own limitations or her projected desires for Leila.

Fozia, Noor’s sister, serves as comic relief and is played with specificity and perfect timing by Rina Fatania. She also, as a deeply flawed pillar of the community, metaphorically conveys the hollowness of middle class respectability.

The tension that Razia plots between the central characters remains constant throughout Favour, even in its most tender and comedic moments. This tension is aided by the expert co-direction of Róisín McBrinn and Sophie Dillon Moniram. They manage physical space with care, crafting uncomfortable triangular chasms between characters and invasions or personal space when appropriate.

The stagecraft, spearheaded by lighting designer Sally Ferguson and set & costume designer Liz Whitbread, hits its peaks when it dips into the surreal. The scene where Aleena attempts to build a fantasy life for Leila brims with campy pleasure and impossibility—a couch becomes a pink salon chair with glowing trim, a mocktail rotates into view from the back wall of the set.

The ending with respect to Noor and Aleena’s relationship feels a little too neat, and potentially unearned. Favour on the whole however, remains a sharp and emotionally impactful piece of work.

 

 

Reviewed by JC Kerr

Photography by Suzi Corker

 


Favour

Bush Theatre

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
Lava | ★★★★ | July 2021

 

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Essex Girl
★★★★

VAULT Festival

Essex Girl

Essex Girl

The Vaults

Reviewed – 7th March 2019

★★★★

 

“Ferguson tells Kirsty’s story with heart and humour, invoking millennial nostalgia by spraying Charlie Red and swigging WKD Blue”

 

Early 2000s Brentwood: By day, 16-year-old Kirsty and her friends attend a Catholic all-girls school, wearing hideous ‘deck chair’ striped uniforms. By night, they’re in platform heels, push-up bras, and skin-tight dresses, downing cheap pre-drinks and conning their way into clubs. On the surface it seems fairly harmless – they’re young, having fun. But the truth is Kirsty’s friends aren’t that nice, and the boys (or men) she meets aren’t that nice either. Actually, most of the time, Kirsty’s not having very much fun at all.

Essex Girl, written and performed by Maria Ferguson, is a scathing one-woman show that confronts a zeitgeist and incisively articulates the damage absorbed by the girls who lived it. But the performance isn’t overtly angry – Ferguson tells Kirsty’s story with heart and humour, invoking millennial nostalgia by spraying Charlie Red and swigging WKD Blue. Instead, like the microaggressions Kirsty encounters, Ferguson’s feminist criticism is insidious. It appears in seemingly offhanded comments: The girls’ schools all have slut-related nicknames (Sacred Heart = Sacred Tarts). The Campion boys don’t have any nicknames. There’s impressive craft in this execution.

Ferguson is a gifted performer. She uncannily embodies the contradiction of the fag-smoking, liquor-drinking, thong-wearing 16-year-old, who is, inescapably, still a child: naively believing her predators are her friends. She tells rich, authentic stories slashed with sharp observation. She describes a time she and her friends, tottering in heels, waited while a bouncer checked their fake IDs. She says only that he looked the girls over, but her delivery communicates volumes: He knew they were underage, but gauged they were sexy enough to be good for business. What do club-prowling, money-spending men want? The bouncer lets them in as casually as tossing bait into a shark tank.

Although the monologue can meander at times, the genius in Ferguson’s script is the subtlety with which she reveals, through entertaining anecdotes, the way girls are primed for abuse. In a land of tanning beds, heavy makeup, and fake tits, Essex girls learn that the goal is to be desired, and to change themselves to achieve it. Kirsty learns all the words to a song she doesn’t like to impress a guy named Ricky. She rates her value on whether or not Ricky wants her. It never occurs to her to re-evaluate whether she should want him: someone who ignores her most of the time and has Guns N’ Roses bedsheets. Kirsty and her friends have been taught to want men to want them, but nothing about having standards for men who respect them.

Of course the power of Essex Girl is that it isn’t just about Essex. Ferguson’s honest and frank account of a teenage girl’s experience will resonate with women regardless of whether they’re from Brentwood, or even the UK. Through skilled storytelling, Ferguson has percipiently captured the moments of injury – the ones most grown women have forgotten, looking at an array of bruises and wondering where they all came from. A valuable addition to the current feminist dialogue.

 

Reviewed by Addison Waite

Photography by Suzi Corker

 

Vault Festival 2019

Essex Girl

Part of VAULT Festival 2019

 

 

 

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