Writer: Sonali Bhattacharyya
Director: Milli Bhatia
On the face of it, the aims of the government’s Prevent strategy sound reasonable: to protect those at risk from radicalisation by extremist factions and to prevent them from becoming terrorists. In practice, the bar set for public bodies to consider their statutory obligations means that young people – particularly those who are non-white – may find their natural and acceptable means of self-expression have them marked as a threat, a label which could possibly haunt them well into adulthood.
Sonali Bhattacharyya’s Liberation Squares sidles up to this topic with a comedy about two Muslim schoolgirls – one a beatboxer and rapper, the other a comic book fan with academic aspirations – and how their lives are thrown into turmoil when the new girl at school turns out to be a TikTok influencer.
Vaneeka Dadhria delivers the broadest humour as Ruqaya, the ebullient performer who finds herself torn between her bookish best friend and Halema Hussain’s charismatic social media star, Xara. Asha Hassan’s Sami provides a semblance of calmness in contrast to the other two girls but finds her strength growing throughout, inspired by her comic book idols, most notably the character of Kamala Khan, aka Ms Marvel.
In addition to the shifting dynamics of friendships under the tectonic pressure of moving from childhood to adulthood, Bhattacharyya also takes sideswipes at the destruction of the public library system under 14 years of austerity. Sami and Ruqaya’s haunt has now become a boutique “Bibliotek” (“complete with quotation marks and a k,” the girls frequently note indignantly), more concerned with selling expensive lattes than lending books. But it is in this centre that Xara, having been recruited as a social media ambassador for a Safe Sisters writing group, introduces the girls to a situation that turns out to have consequences for them all.
Bhattacharyya ramps up the action and comedy nicely as the play progresses, Hussain proving especially adept at capturing the righteous, self-important indignation of impetuous youth. After the girls complain online about a disagreement with the Safe Sisters’ organiser, their actions attract the attention of Prevent.
The strategy is introduced to us as the girls discover facts about it, making it clear that many of the “warning signs” – feelings of grievance and injustice, of being under threat – are not uncommon; they may also be justifiable, especially in the face of bullying of the sort that Sami and Ruqaya face daily from classmates.
The play’s thesis is that Prevent gives many young people, particularly those of South Asian heritage, a label that compounds those they are already given in a society which others them in so many ways. While this is made crystal clear by Bhattacharyya’s characters, it is never at the cost of entertainment, though. As the trio engages in a climactic heist to retrieve Xara’s mobile phone – which, as with the rest of the piece, deals with low-stakes issues heightened into life-or-death situations by teenage determination – the humanity of the girls leads the way.
And that humanity is also at the heart of Liberation Squares. Whatever good intentions the Prevent strategy may profess, when the young people it is supposed to protect feel that it does the opposite, then something clearly needs to change. This is a play that knows how to pull back every time it threatens to beat us over the head with its message: seeing its meaning play out in its engaging three leads is instructive enough.
Continues until 11 May 2024
