Hurling Rubble at the Park

Avaes Mohammad’s two-part play Hurling Rubble at the Sun/Moon has an aura of bedroom theatre about it. Sofas and tables are piled up to create a multifunctional set, wallpaper peels in the background, and the sound effects and video projector have a cheesy home-made quality about them. But the juxtaposition of this makeshift, rough-and-ready style, oozing with human stink, with the international tragedies of 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings gives these latter events a poignant human element that cannot be achieved through news coverage and dramatic visual footage.

Hurling Rubble at the Sun comes first, exploring the mind and character of Taufeeq ‘T’ Sultan, a seemingly typical youth from Blackburn, as he teeters on the edge of a highly dangerous mission. T lives alone, he loves rap, has an adoring girlfriend and often goes to his mother’s for dinner – a typical young man. Tonight, however, he is changed, and he needs his mother’s love like never before. But his mother Amma is a proud, hard done by Pakistani mother who won’t willingly indulge, leaving T desperate and sorrowful. Hurling Rubble at the Moon reveals the four years that have led up to this point: from one heated summer in 2001 to another in 2005, mapping the rise in racial tension and the conflict, both ideologically and emotionally, between white and Asian cultures.

Nearly a decade after the 7/7 bombings, Mohammad demonstrates, in a blunt, unabashed fashion, the delicacy and complexity of culture clash and national ideology. The characterisation is unapologetically stereotypical, yet it is this, along with the hyperbolic and gaudy style of the theatrical devices, that allows Mohammad to reduce the absurd and the monumentally tragic into something comprehensively human.

Expect horrific violence, easy humour and painfully emotive silences to rub shoulders like sardines. Despite the invaluable opportunity to view both sides of the argument, Hurling Rubble is worth going to for Bharti Patel’s (Amma) magnificently controlled, cruelly cutting cold shoulder alone.

Alex Finch

Hurling Rubble is on at the Park Theatre until 6^th June 2015, for further information or to book tickets visit here.