Rahul has never thought of himself as anything but British. His mum may insist on taking the ashes of deceased family members to the Ganges but, as far as Rahul is concerned, three generations of his family have lived by the Thames and he’s a Londoner. But is that how others see him?
It’s complicated, and Vinay Patel’s monologue, which jumps back and forth between the 2005 London bombings and the euphoria of the 2012 Olympics, doesn’t shirk those complications. It teases out an alternative narrative to the one so often presented in the media about young Asian men.
At its simplest, this is a convincingly observed coming-of-age story as the Blur-loving 18-year-old Rahul falls for a girl while on a protest march on the second anniversary of the Iraq war, takes his A-levels, and goes on an absinthe-fuelled holiday to Spain.
But everything changes with 7/7. It’s not just armed police at airports and stations who eye this young Asian man and his rucksack distrustfully: fellow train passengers look at him suspiciously, too. The boy becomes a man: older, certainly wiser, but still grappling with the fallout from the actions of his younger self, and still probing exactly what it really means to belong.
There’s a lot wrapped up in this deceptively simple little package that is performed with an engaging immediacy by David Mumeni . Patel writes with complete honesty and unforced poetry about a young man swept up in the tides of contemporary history. Rahul is forced into making and defending choices about who he is and who he isn’t when he has barely ceased to be a child.
It’s wordy, over-long and the staging doesn’t always indicate the switches of time frame sufficiently. But this is a play with real heart that loudly asks the questions we can’t afford to ignore about how we might all wave a flag together.
• Until 22 February. Venue: The Vaults, London.
