Writers: Zia Ahmed with Mohammad Ali Yunis, Casper Ahmed, and Sohail Hussain
Directors: Evie Manning, Iram Rehman, Sajidah Shabir, Rosema Nawaz, Mariyah Kayat, Madeyah Khan, and Maleehah Hussain.
Peaceophobia, currently running at Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Car Park as part of The Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, is an unexpected mashup of car show and peppy interactive site-specific theatre. Written and performed by three witty and charismatic petrolheads from Bradford, the piece is part reflection on the lived experience of growing up against a backdrop of racism, and part paean to the power of a souped-up racer bringing meaning to difficult lives. The combination of prose, poetry, rap, talking motors, and magic tricks does not always work, but it is inventive and genuine, and powered by a burning urge to communicate something of importance.
Thankfully, at the outset of the 60-minute show the three protagonists (Mohammad Ali Yunis, Casper Ahmed, and Sohail Hussain) provide a clear protocol for showing the due level of respect for their impressively modified vehicles. No touching the Cupra, because it leaves fingerprints on a vehicle that has taken a day to polish. No insulting the Golf; it may not be to your tastes, but it is somebody’s dream motor and boy, do the guys know a lot about the history of Golfs. Even the dodgy-looking Vauxhall Nova, which starts off in broken pieces and is built-up on stage before our eyes, deserves a certain measure of regard.
“We break it down and we build it up” is the recurring theme of the show. It is a reflection on one strategy which the men adopt to manage their frequent encounters with racism and Islamophobia. By subsuming a part of their identity in a positive process of creation, they challenge and overcome. Building up your car is a cipher for building up your life. For a community that is, as they remind us, “simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible”, it is clear there is much more to ‘building it up’ than making your motor look flashy. It is a form of freedom.
The litany of casual and often unthinking intolerance that the men describe is depressingly familiar. Endless police stop and searches, the assumption that anyone with a flashy car is a drug-dealer, random arrests and equally random releases without charge, tipsy white girls who pull on their beards for a laugh, everyday racist comments from fellow dog-walkers; it is all there. But at its heart this is a positive and uplifting piece, set to a superb soundtrack and packed with humour. It feels under-rehearsed, there is an occasional technical hitch, and it comes apart a bit at the end, but so what.
You may not get many opportunities in life to visit a show in a car park by the A12. Carpe Diem.
Runs until 10 September 2022
The Greenwich + Docklands International Festival runs until 11 September 2022
