Serious journalism - or just ‘a spoonful of Muslim’?

Actors’ headshots by Johan Persson

Daniel Nelson

Jihad is a mid-20s Brit of South Asian origin. He wants to be a journalist. But his career never takes off (“I got nothing to show for it”) until he enters a competition.

His two pals, Rashid (a Heathrow part-time baggage handler) and Asif (car hire company assistant manager), come up with a great idea for a story for the competition - and Jihad wins.

It’s his big break. 

Or is it?

His programme, ’Pipe Dreams’ (“Yo, that’s SICK”), will be about the trio’s favourite Shisha bar, Chunkyz, and its importance to the local community.

It will be serious, nuanced journalism. 

Gradually, however, the competition organisers, Ajami Media, cajole and entice him into shifting the focus, initially, from Shisha lounges to South Asian Muslum masculinity and, later, to digging out the personal experiences of his two friends, and giving them a “troubled pasts” spin - more akin to traditional Western reports about young Muslim men, but through the eyes not of a Western reporter but of “a new voice”.

Jihad is aware of what’s happening. Instead of creating a new agenda, he is following the old agenda (“Just a spoonful of Muslim makes the news go down. In the most alarming way”) and making it acceptable to current sensitivities by delivering it from inside the minority community. Is he selling out?

He rationalises it by telling himself that if he can make a name for himself with this programme he will then be able to make programmes that are less stereotypical, more honest and penetrating.

Around this set-up, Mohamed-Zain Dada has written an outstanding first play, Blue Mist – funny, serious, fast-moving, backed up by a convincing cast (Salman Akhtar, Omar Bynon, Arian Nik), and a gifted director, Milli Bhatia. The actors’ energy and movement produce a constant whir of movement on the simplest of sets, apart from one brilliant coup de theatre that could have been a dramatic finale as the renegade Jihad is physically cut from his friends.

Yes, it’s a young, male, Muslim, second generation South Asian view of Britain that gently mocks aunties and out-of-touch uncles, occasionally veers off topic and drops in jarring expressive movement, but it has a lot to say and an entertaining way of saying it. It makes much London theatre look pale and stale.

* Blue Mist, by Mohamed-Zain Dada,£12-£25, is at the Royal Court, Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS until 18 November. Info:  https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/blue-mist/