Slice of life in a carwash under pressure
Photo: Jack Bush_0010
Daniel Nelson
There’s so much going on in Ostan that it’s sometimes hard to make out what’s going on.
It’s set in a carwash that’s losing out to nearby competitors run by Afghans to the south and Kosovans to the north. So the Persian owner resorts to a risky side-hustle.
The 90-minute play at the Park Theatre has a lot going for it. Where else can you eavesdrop on the Home Office’s hostile attitude to asylum-seekers’ leave-to-remain calls, hear migrants of varying ethnicities bitching about each other, face the blame as Brits for destabilising Iraq but refusing to admit many Iraqis, realise the differences between Kurds from Iraq and Syria, understand the lure of running a people-smuggling operation, learn about Wash and Wax?
This is all interesting and important stuff, swirling invisibly around us all the time, and it’s great that it’s in the Park spotlight.
Playwright Arzhang Luke Pezhman (the son of immigrant Iranian father who ran a shop in Wolverhampton) is clearly fascinated by the Kurds, a people with no country and many: “As an Anglo-Iranian refugee myself…’tribalisation’ - whereby internal, community difference is dictated by the surrounding countries, while outward, individual allegiances are denoted through hyphenation (Iraqi-Kurd, Iranian-Kurd, Turkish-Kurd) - where I felt the heart of the story of Ostan lay. Specifically, how it translated to recently arrived, first-generation Kurdish immigrants living and working in neo-liberal England.”
Pezhman has an ear for conversation and an eye for attitudes and has delivered a slice of working-class immigrant life.
The cast are good, too: Ojan Genem, who is British-Turkish; Sekan Avlik, British-Turkish with Kurdish ancestry; Dana Haqjoo, Iranian British, El Anthony; Moghsen Ghaffari. You see real people, not role-players.
But the demotic dialogue, complete with untranslated bursts of Sorani or Kurmanji, often competes with itself when Pezhman runs two conversations in parallel, overambitiously reverberating a word from one conversation into the other. Even more distractingly, the pacey plot-twists and ethnic intricacies are frequently drowned out by boisterous overhead shoot-’em-up computer game simulations.
Plot and dialogue throw up several strong ideas but the hustle and bustle of the piece allows no time and space to follow them up.
The best approach for the audience might be not to struggle to catch every nuance but to sit back and watch the play drive energetically forward, catching what you can and trying later to recollect and consider some of the points made.
Ostan, £25-£9, is at the Park Theatre, 13 Clifton Terrace, Finsbury Park, N4 3JP, until 12 October. Info: https://parktheatre.co.uk/event/ostan/