Khadija is 18, Finborough, SW10 - review

Hope and hard work in the face of adversity from teenage asylum seekers in Hackney
P53 Khadija ©Alastair Muir
5 November 2012

Here’s a bracing blast from the immigration frontline. Shamser Sinha, making a terrific full-length professional playwriting debut, takes us confidently into the harsh world of “unaccompanied” teenage asylum seekers in Hackney. What he uncovers here makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing.

Khadija (Aysha Kala) and Liza (Katherine Rose Morley) have been friends in adversity ever since the former arrived from Afghanistan. The latter, from an unnamed eastern European country, cares for her baby sister, claiming the child is hers for benefit reasons.

These feisty women, typical teenagers yet with two lifetimes’ worth of bitter experience, study as well as work in below-minimum-wage cleaning jobs. Their lives are intertwined but also strained beyond breaking point in their damp hostel. Khadija’s diffident new boyfriend Ade (Victor Alli) isn’t helping, nor is his swaggering best friend Sam (Damson Idris), with his comments about “refs” (refugees).

What gives Sinha’s play its drive is the way he focuses not on where Khadija and Liza have come from but where they would like to go. The imminence of their18th birthdays, when their immigration status becomes uncertain, is the time bomb ticking away under the action.

The impressive Kala gives energetic Khadija a default setting of aggression in the face of a hostile world, yet she movingly reveals how, behind all the attitude and bravado, lie vulnerability and fear.

Khadija and Ade could be on the brink of something lovely but circumstances are always destined to get in the way. Aggressive bursts of rap music punctuate the scenes in Tim Stark’s pumped-up production, which plays out on a set of gritty, grey, graffitied urban blocks.

Until Nov 24 (0844 847 1652, finboroughtheatre.co.uk)

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