In the north of England between 1990 and into the 2010s, hundred of young girls were subjected to grooming and sexual exploitation by predatory men. Though the exposure of gangs of mainly Pakistani heritage in Rochdale and Rotherham the headlines, it was more widespread. Emteaz Hussain’s play is set at that time in an unnamed town in 2011. It is fiction, but its background is in reality.
It isn’t an explanation or a picture of abuse and grooming but explores the effects on community and one family in particular. Zara Sharif employed one of the accused to decorate her kitchen; that was enough to associate her with them, worse still her own son Raheel has his photo splashed on the front page as one of the perpetrators. He is innocent, but the damage is done; there has already been shit dropped through their letterbox. A retraction appears later in small print on page eight of the paper—but who is going to read that.
Zara is chopping up onions to contribute to a friend’s party, but she’s on edge, When there is a knock at the door and someone calls out for her, she hides. Then her social worker sister Yasmin unexpectedly turns up who had her own experience of local opprobrium and moved away to escape reaction to her relationship with her son Jamal’s Jamaican father.
Avita Jay and Lena Kaur as Zara and Yasmin both give strong performances conveying their questioning but caring relationship, while Gurjeet Singh’s Raheel seems numbed by his situation, though his teenage sister Sofia (Humera Syed) is actively organising attempts to present a different image of Muslim men.
The family think Raheel’s former white girlfriend Jade, herself a past abuse victim, is against them, but they are wrong, and Maya Bartley O’Dea gives her a dogged persistence despite her frustration.
Expendable is a relatively short play that spreads its net widely: inbuilt prejudice in both white and Pakistani communities, Muslim misogyny, homophobia, the innocent trapped by hate and hysteria, faith issues and loyalties as well as grooming. It is more successful in its picture of family than in handling the many other problems it raises, but there is an undercurrent of frustration from these women in a man’s world. Has anything changed since this 2011 situation?
Reviewer: Howard Loxton