In the week that Keir Starmer warned that immigrants might reduce Britain to an “island of strangers” if numbers are not curbed, this play gives voice to British Iraqi refugees, and self-proclaimed “insane” ones at that. Laith Elzubaidi’s autobiographical play is not about immigrants, refugees or asylum seekers inflicting a sense of alienation on British society. It describes what they contend with psychologically, often in silence, and how it ripples down to the next generation.
Tommy Sim’aan, playing the part of Laith, recounts early memories of his Shia Muslim parents who fled Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and who bury their unspoken PTSD and fear in a semblance of hard-working normality in Wembley, north-west London.
Politically, the play illustrates the notion that “we are here because you were there”, joining up the apparent immigrant invasion with Britain’s colonial invasions abroad. Laith’s parents are here because Britain was there. The 2003 Iraq war plays out on televisions strewn around Liam Bunster’s set; this was not the first time Britain occupied Iraq – that was in 1914, Laith tells us.
The dominating note is not anger but humour. The production, directed by Emily Ling Williams, is set up as a lively monologue, with the bearing of a standup comedy act. Sim’aan is the joker-narrator, raising his eyebrow at the foibles of his Arab parents – a dad who, in the midst of a heart attack, put on his best suit and offered the paramedics tea, and a mother who sends him to a therapist trained by the CIA for his OCD.
Beneath the bonhomie and heartiness, this is a play about trauma. Its politics are secondary to the focus on psychological damage and, by the end, healing. There is silliness, some screwed-on political messages, and the story of Laith’s first romance that seems to veer into a coming-of-age story but slowly gains in relevance. It comes together in a tearjerker of a final scene. A warm show with an irrepressibly big heart, albeit one that never quite stops feeling like standup.
Perhaps Starmer should watch it. Maybe it will remind him that immigrants on our shores are not an overwhelmingly dangerous scourge but often vulnerable and broken human beings, trying hard to put themselves back together again in their newfound homes.
• At the Bush theatre, London, until 7 June
