Speed has been a brilliant success for the Bush Theatre, a play about a group of aggressive drivers taking part in a speed awareness course in a basement training room in Birmingham. Yes, a very prosaic setting but one which is the scene for one of the best comedy-dramas seen in London this year, a comedy-drama which hits notes of psychological horror among the hilarity. It’s kind of The Office meets Baby Reindeer, but with a post-riots Asian-British angle that makes it searing and timely.
The story revolves around Abz, the course facilitator and passionate advocate of road safety, played with Alan Partridge/Travis Bickle vim by Nikesh Patel. The Devil’s Hour and Starstruck man hasn’t been on stage for 9 years - more by accident (well, lots of TV work) than design - but this one was too good to pass up.
“I was really excited about it having resonance for the South Asian community, but it’s a very British play at the same time,” he says, “Everyone's got either a firsthand experience of the set-up or knows what that environment is like. It’s told as a comedy but becomes more and more uncomfortable.”
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Written by Mohamed-Zain Dada and directed by Milli Bhatia (who previously combined on the Olivier Award-nominated Blue Mist), the play has Abz trying to control an unruly group consisting of Harleen the nurse (Sabrina Sandu), delivery driver Samir (Arian Nik) and Faiza, an entrepreneur/influencer (Sazia Nicholls). Things quickly descend into a group therapy session and then unravel further as they learn more about each other, and Abz starts coming apart at the seams.
Patel says he received permission to go “full Partridge” with Abz, but he’s a masterful creation in his own right, hiding trauma beneath a determination to uphold - and instill - British values.
“There’s little references to Keep Calm and Carry On and the Blitz Spirit, these ‘traditional’ British values that have been co-opted by political actors interested in sowing division,” he says, “And the play looks at what happens when someone really takes that on without self-examination.
“We all have a strong sense of the American Dream and what that represents, and the promise of that for someone who becomes an American. But what is the British version of that contract? I think anyone who’s from an immigrant background has to negotiate that. Even if they pretend that they don’t have to negotiate it, it’s going to come up anyway.”
This is one of the tensions that the play plucks, as the group unravel separately and then come to realise Abz is in several forms of denial about who is. Patel says the play was an opportunity to creatively deal with last year’s anti-immigration violence and rhetoric which led many communities to fear for their lives and place in British society. “It left a psychological scar on so many people,” says Patel, “There hasn’t been a huge amount of engagement with this, which is one of the reasons I’m so proud of the play.”
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Not that this play is a lecture, far from it. In fact the brilliance lies in how it deals with questions of identity and racist abuse and trauma in very real ways that flow from the characters, and which are frequently hilarious. Such is the chemistry between the actors - who are all truly amazing - that it can veer from heartbreak to high farce within seconds. A friend of Patel’s thought it was like ‘Inside No.9’ and as things develop a dark, surrealist edge comes to the fore.
Without giving the game away too much, with Abz you have a study in depression, a state in which reality can twist into waking nightmares.
“Milli was very clear on us telling the psychological story, and having a mystery,” Patel says, “It’s an engagement with trauma and grief, and in the rehearsal rooms were looking at how plenty of men still aren’t able to get the support they need after a traumatic event, or don’t think they need it.
“And I guess [professional help] is often seen as something that’s only available if you’re white and middle class. Particularly middle class. But there is this thing in immigrant communities where your story is so much about struggle and hardship and toughness that it makes you want to stick it out.”
In this regard, the traditional British behaviour that Abz is adopting is the stiff upper lip: “Certainly in my experience there’s a bit of a crossover between that very British idea of putting a brave face on, and then the immigrant experience, where physical survival is so important that we don’t learn to express our inner lives. It gets boxed up and ignored, and you’ll throw yourself into work instead.”
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Such a dovetailing of repression is eventually blown apart powerfully in the play. And in contrast to his character, Patel is a very open and expansive person to talk to; you feel his sincere enthusiasm for this material, and an obvious intelligence that made him into heartthrob material in Starstruck, Rose Matafeo’s engaging comedy series.
He was born in Wembley, and although his parents were both pharmacists, he caught the acting bug while reading English at Warwick University, and went on to study at the Guildhall before the stage beckoned, and then the screen took over. He’s married to broadcaster Nicola Thorp and the pair have a young child, which has produced a whole other set of challenges to negotiate with him on what is a demanding theatre run.
“It’s been a bit of a baptism of fire,” he says, “I’ve been launched into an all-consuming rehearsal process and then I’m not home 6 nights a week. My wife’s been incredible. It’s just eye-opening, the infrastructure involved with a child! Luckily my family live nearby, but childcare is so expensive.
“It’s starting to make more sense to me why immigrant families, working class families, don’t move too far from your own. You all pitch in! I’m at an interesting time in my life where your community becomes important, even just mates with kids. Sharing resources! Or even just 11pm WhatsApp messages going, ‘how the fuck do you do this?’”
His career is going well, he’s also wrapped the third series of Amazon Prime’s The Devil’s Hour after the run. But having a child has changed things, he’s no longer feeling the actor stress of the gaps between jobs, since he gets to hang out with his child.
And he thinks Speed has been important for the way he thinks about his life and career. He’s keen to tell more of these type of stories – write them too – as the effect that drama can have on lives is again and again illustrated in shows like Mr Bates vs The Post Office and Adolescence.
“The conversation around Adolescence is really interesting, and I get some people are like, why does it take a Netflix drama for people to care about this?” he says, “But people often don’t have the time to engage with everything. Helping people to understand something in a way they haven’t before is one of the reasons I’m really proud of Speed.
“I've been really fortunate with what I've been doing as a gun for hire, but now I’m thinking if I really stick with it, what are the stories that I want to tell? I’m excited to move from ‘what am I right for?’ to ‘What do I want to do?’”
This is also partly governed by the world we find ourselves, which is crying out for smart voices like Patel’s.
“This thing of DEI has gone too far, the successful rebranding of woke and reframing it as, ‘thank God we can dial that back’… I’ve got no time for it,” he says, “The beliefs that underpin your life and how you move through the world, and whether you’re seen as an equal, people aren’t suddenly going to abandon them. And think, we’ve had too many years of diversity on screen, let’s go back to the good old days. That’s not going to happen. Well, not on my watch!”
Speed is at the Bush Theatre until 17 May. The Devil’s Hour is on Amazon Prime.
