REVIEW: The Boy at the Back of the Class – Malvern Theatres (Tuesday, March 19 to Saturday, March 23).
IN an ever-darkening world ravaged by war, famine and the mass displacement of human populations, glimmers of hope in the global gloom would appear to be in short supply.
But this play, based on the novel by Onjali Rauf, and adapted for the stage by Nick Ahad, provides a flicker of hope as the children in the story band together to not only fight injustice, but by doing so, help to create a slightly better planet in a small corner of Britain.
Ahmet, played with a degree of poignancy that wrenches rather than tugs at the heartstrings by Farshid Rokey, is a Kurdish refugee who has fled his war-torn home in Syria.
We first meet him as he starts, with understandably great trepidation, school in London. The audience’s empathy kicks in right from the start – after all, everyone remembers that gruelling first day, don’t we?
With a subject matter as contentious as this, the colours are very soon firmly nailed to the mast, as the obligatory racist in the form of Brendan (Joe McNamara) makes his ugly presence felt.
A while later, he morphs into a similarly disposed character, only this time in adult form, where he’s aided and abetted by Zoe Zak. Both are ranting cliches, the staccato, harsh vowels of Cockney speech adding to the sense of alienated communities struggling to come to terms with the massive changes that have been imposed upon them.
Zak sheds the crust of her chrysalis yet again to burst forth as Mr Irons, who appears more like a boys’ grammar school master from the late 1950s, complete with mortarboard and gown, rather than a teacher in a modern-day London sink estate comp.
So where did he come from? Some time-warped parallel universe presumably.
Priya Davdra is entirely believable as beleaguered teacher Mrs Khan, whose sole function seems to be more about crowd control rather than imparting knowledge to her charges.
Then, at the end of the school day, she also switches roles, shedding her day skin and becoming a kind of mumsie figure, with welcoming mumsie bosom and no doubt smelling ever-so delicately of Imperial Leather soap and rose water.
Sasha Desouza-Willock as Alexa is our storyteller, and what a compelling, blisteringly superb job she makes of it, narrating Ahmet’s progress from a minority of one to becoming the toast of his schoolmates.
Yet it is Farshid Rokey who commands our attention from start to finish, skilfully playing the confused and frightened young boy who finds himself in a world that at the beginning might as well be the surface of the Moon.
The question of hundreds of people weekly crossing the English Channel in small boats is undeniably one of the major problems of our times, and one that will have to eventually be solved by adults.
But what the writers have done here is to create a very heart-warming story that solely concerns those who have no say whatsoever in the matter, the voiceless children who are swept up in the affairs of grown-ups.
The Boy at the Back of the Class is truly a fairy tale of our times, and like all good fairy tales, has a happy ending. And on a purely human level, devoid of the political divides, this play works very well indeed.