Alkaline takes the well-worn drama of the middle-class dinner party and gives it an unexpected twist. The play opens as Sophie and her fiance, Nick, prepare to host an old school friend, Sarah, and her new British Asian boyfriend, Ali. The moral panic brewing in Sophie’s sitting room is not just over Ali’s cultural difference, but also Sarah’s recent conversion to Islam.
It is an edgy, and potentially explosive, starting point for what is both a contemporary comedy of manners and a state-of-the-nation play about Brexit, liberalism, austerity, and most of all, the threat that modern Islam is perceived to pose to the conservative heartlands of middle England.
Sarah arrives wearing a hijab and talks of finding herself through her new faith: “It’s like trying to describe what love feels like in your stomach,” she tells Sophie, and these moments, in which she relates what Islam has come to mean to her, are some of the most poetic and powerful.
Georgia de Grey’s slickly designed set is claustrophobically intimate, and Stephanie Martin’s script is strong on excruciatingly stilted small talk and politically incorrect faux pas. The tone and setup is reminiscent of Abigail’s Party in the early scenes. Sophie is the little Englander who can’t accept Ali and Sarah’s relationship and she is keenly satirised for it, from her casual racism towards Ali to awkward exchanges with Sarah. “It’s suits you,” she says of the headscarf, before commanding her not to wear it at her wedding, where Sarah will be a bridesmaid.
Ali responds nonchalantly, sipping beer, ribbing Sophie (“I vote Islamic takeover”) and appearing pre-eminently English, however hard Sophie tries to position him as an outsider. Each of the couples play their parts convincingly – though EJ Martin’s Sophie and Claire Cartwright’s Sarah are far more fleshed out as characters than their male counterparts.
The brittle humour exposes faultlines in both relationships, but the play builds to an explosive climax – like the heart attack of Abigail’s Party – that never comes. When Ali’s wife, Aleesha, suddenly enters, it appears as if teeth might be bared, but the couples maintain a veneer of middle-class civility to the end. Alkaline winds up feeling like a play whose final, killer scene has not yet been written. With it, this drama could be devastatingly good.
- Alkaline is at Park theatre, London, until 4 August.