Sweet Cider

It was worth making the effort to get to the penultimate showing of Sweet Cider, Emteaz Hussain’s stage debut for Tamasha productions. It helps that I am enamoured with the plethora of Turkish grill restaurants, or mangal ocakbasis, that encircle the Arcola theatre in Dalston. (My cousin recently changed my life by introducing me to Hasan Meze & Mangal whose grilled onion with pomegranate juice, olive oil and lemon juice is simply superb).

The play itself was both charming and challenging. The audience is invited to share an unspecified period of time with two Muslim girls from somewhere near Manchester as they rebuild their lives having been forced to relocate to a women's refuge. It was refreshing to see the idiosyncratic Northern Anglo-Pakistani dialect replicated so wonderfully well on stage.

My only criticism would have to be the writer's succumbing to dealing with seemingly every single issue affecting British Muslim youth at the expense of character development. A noteworthy debut nonetheless.