Insane Asylum Seekers review – likably droll telling of generational trauma

In the week that Keir Starmer warned that immigrants mightiness trim Britain to an “island of strangers” if numbers are not curbed, this play gives dependable to British Iraqi refugees, and self-proclaimed “insane” ones astatine that. Laith Elzubaidi’s autobiographical play is not astir immigrants, refugees oregon asylum seekers inflicting a consciousness of alienation connected British society. It describes what they contend with psychologically, often successful silence, and however it ripples down to the adjacent generation.

Tommy Sim’aan, playing the portion of Laith, recounts aboriginal memories of his Shia Muslim parents who fled Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and who hide their unspoken PTSD and fearfulness successful a semblance of hard-working normality successful Wembley, north-west London.

Politically, the play illustrates the conception that “we are present due to the fact that you were there”, joining up the evident migrant penetration with Britain’s assemblage invasions abroad. Laith’s parents are present due to the fact that Britain was there. The 2003 Iraq warfare plays retired connected televisions strewn astir Liam Bunster’s set; this was not the archetypal clip Britain occupied Iraq – that was successful 1914, Laith tells us.

The dominating enactment is not choler but humour. The production, directed by Emily Ling Williams, is acceptable up arsenic a lively monologue, with the bearing of a standup drama act. Sim’aan is the joker-narrator, raising his eyebrow astatine the foibles of his Arab parents – a dada who, successful the midst of a bosom attack, enactment connected his champion suit and offered the paramedics tea, and a parent who sends him to a therapist trained by the CIA for his OCD.

Beneath the bonhomie and heartiness, this is simply a play astir trauma. Its authorities are secondary to the absorption connected intelligence harm and, by the end, healing. There is silliness, immoderate screwed-on governmental messages, and the communicative of Laith’s archetypal romance that seems to veer into a coming-of-age communicative but dilatory gains successful relevance. It comes unneurotic successful a tearjerker of a last scene. A lukewarm amusement with an irrepressibly large heart, albeit 1 that ne'er rather stops feeling similar standup.

Perhaps Starmer should ticker it. Maybe it volition punctual him that immigrants connected our shores are not an overwhelmingly unsafe scourge but often susceptible and breached quality beings, trying hard to enactment themselves backmost unneurotic again successful their newfound homes.