The Mac last night? Brimful of ushers, it was...
I went to see Joe Nawaz' "Fake I.D." at the Mac last night.
Joe is a friend of mine. He won't like me saying that in public: he prefers terms like "foe" or "nemesis". But it is true. And I have seen Fake I.D. many times in as many iterations. Hell, I even did the tech for his show at The Strand: clenched on a tiny stool at the back of the room, squinting at the script in the half-light, trying to get a the dizzying array of photos of the young Joe crying in the right order.
So I know this show. I used to say I know this show better than Joe did because I am unkind, and also correct. But this is no longer the case. Joe is off book. And the piece is transformed.
He opened the show like Theresa May at a Conservative Party Conference (though it was a full house), with an intoxicating display of the Terpsichorean arts. But this was no hollow stunt dreamt up by a P.R. team to humanise a brittle and unrelatable figure. Nawaz is human, too human; human to a fault. And he can't afford a P.R. team.
Fake I.D. is the story of Joe's struggle with his Pakistani heritage growing up in Belfast. And his struggle to deal with the man whom he imagined was the author of every single one of his problems, Pakistan incarnate: his dad Rab. All Joe wants to do is be like everyone else and the shock of his difference resonates like a fresh slap everyday. His mixed heritage is a mark of Cain: he can never escape the curse, and a manifestation of that curse is squatting in his living room watching "The Money Programme", or angrily attempting to teach him the Urdu for a duck for an hour each Sunday. To his credit Joe does know the Urdu for duck.
Point to Rab, there.
When he get's his first Fake I.D. Joe sees his chance to escape his poisonously exotic surname and opts to become the none-more-Catholic Joe Donnelly. That his treachery is discovered and acknowledged and it still remains unspoken tells you everything about the tension, sensitivity and intelligence of the people involved. It's at moments like this that the universality of the piece is revealed - we are all embarrassed by peculiar families who don't do things properly and who don't understand, and whose love we return with scorn while accepting that we are still loved. And we come to realise that the cloying, damp duvet of feeling that bears down on us and robs us of our breath, is our love for them; heavy unworkable love that suffocates us. There are lots of things in this show that seem to be about Belfast or Pakistan, but that is the surface of it. Everyone who has had a family knows this story.
Nawaz is funny and smart, strutting like a peacock in winkle-pickers one moment, ritually disembowelling himself and asking you to sniff his guts the next. Before he used to trip himself up, heckling himself up, apologising for being there. Now there is a new confidence. He believes he should be there, telling you this. This is a proper, timely story. And he's right, but now he's telling you this story as well as he has always written it.
Congratulations must go to director Emily Foran as well for finally teasing a performance out of him. She must have used a whip and a chair. Well now he's standing on one leg, balancing a ball on his nose. Extraordinary work.
P.S. We recently did a playlet together called The Desperate Hours which, spectacularly indulgently, featured two actors in a room pretending to be Joe and I attempting to write the play "The Desperate Hours". One of the actors was called Jo Donnelly.
She played me. So near and yet so far, Nawaz.
Joe is a friend of mine. He won't like me saying that in public: he prefers terms like "foe" or "nemesis". But it is true. And I have seen Fake I.D. many times in as many iterations. Hell, I even did the tech for his show at The Strand: clenched on a tiny stool at the back of the room, squinting at the script in the half-light, trying to get a the dizzying array of photos of the young Joe crying in the right order.
So I know this show. I used to say I know this show better than Joe did because I am unkind, and also correct. But this is no longer the case. Joe is off book. And the piece is transformed.
He opened the show like Theresa May at a Conservative Party Conference (though it was a full house), with an intoxicating display of the Terpsichorean arts. But this was no hollow stunt dreamt up by a P.R. team to humanise a brittle and unrelatable figure. Nawaz is human, too human; human to a fault. And he can't afford a P.R. team.
Fake I.D. is the story of Joe's struggle with his Pakistani heritage growing up in Belfast. And his struggle to deal with the man whom he imagined was the author of every single one of his problems, Pakistan incarnate: his dad Rab. All Joe wants to do is be like everyone else and the shock of his difference resonates like a fresh slap everyday. His mixed heritage is a mark of Cain: he can never escape the curse, and a manifestation of that curse is squatting in his living room watching "The Money Programme", or angrily attempting to teach him the Urdu for a duck for an hour each Sunday. To his credit Joe does know the Urdu for duck.
Point to Rab, there.
When he get's his first Fake I.D. Joe sees his chance to escape his poisonously exotic surname and opts to become the none-more-Catholic Joe Donnelly. That his treachery is discovered and acknowledged and it still remains unspoken tells you everything about the tension, sensitivity and intelligence of the people involved. It's at moments like this that the universality of the piece is revealed - we are all embarrassed by peculiar families who don't do things properly and who don't understand, and whose love we return with scorn while accepting that we are still loved. And we come to realise that the cloying, damp duvet of feeling that bears down on us and robs us of our breath, is our love for them; heavy unworkable love that suffocates us. There are lots of things in this show that seem to be about Belfast or Pakistan, but that is the surface of it. Everyone who has had a family knows this story.
Nawaz is funny and smart, strutting like a peacock in winkle-pickers one moment, ritually disembowelling himself and asking you to sniff his guts the next. Before he used to trip himself up, heckling himself up, apologising for being there. Now there is a new confidence. He believes he should be there, telling you this. This is a proper, timely story. And he's right, but now he's telling you this story as well as he has always written it.
Congratulations must go to director Emily Foran as well for finally teasing a performance out of him. She must have used a whip and a chair. Well now he's standing on one leg, balancing a ball on his nose. Extraordinary work.
P.S. We recently did a playlet together called The Desperate Hours which, spectacularly indulgently, featured two actors in a room pretending to be Joe and I attempting to write the play "The Desperate Hours". One of the actors was called Jo Donnelly.
She played me. So near and yet so far, Nawaz.
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