Between 2008 and 2012, numerous vulnerable white young girls were groomed, and sexually exploited by a group of predominantly Pakistani men in Rochdale, a northern English town. This is known as the Rochdale child sex abuse scandal, spreading nationwide outrage and igniting debates about race and gender.
Based on this real-life scandal, Emteaz Hussain’s Expendable portrays the Pakistani community through the lens of two sisters: Zara (Avita Jay), whose son Raheel (Gurjeet Singh) is wrongfully accused of being an abuser, and Yasmin (Lena Kaur), a survivor of sexual abuse. Zara also has a younger daughter, Sofia (Hunera Syed), an online Islamic activist. Meanwhile, there is also Jade (Maya Bartley O’Dea), a former child abuse victim of a Pakistani man who once worked in Zara’s kitchen.
Hussain’s writing brings most of the characters to life. I especially appreciated the different ways Zara and Yasmin cut an onion. While Zara’s trembling hands reflect her deep anxiety, Yasmin does it in a more normal and relaxed way. This subtle contrast reveals their differences in personality. Zara is too uptight and too afraid of any change, living with extra caution that may actually smother chances of transformation. On the contrary, as a survivor, Yasmin presents a more chilled vibe. She encourages changes and amplifications of the voices of the Pakistani community, even though she doubts Sofia’s unwavering obedience to her “uncle” and her approach of cyber-activism.
One of the most touching moments comes when Raheel asks Yasmin how she has gone through all this. Esther Richardson’s naturalistic directing approach sparks this simple exchange with great nuance and subtlety, helped by Azusa Ono’s natural lighting that adds extra warmth and a sense of knowing. Lena Kaur’s facial expression is kind and gentle with divine strength that easily draws your tears to run down.
This moment, however, stands in stark contrast to the play’s overall reluctance to confront its themes, and Richardson’s well-curated directorial decisions help little to Hussain’s out of depth writing. Her writing, like Zara’s overt cautiousness, seems too afraid to risk the unseen consequences of open provocation. Jade, who could have offered the play’s most sophisticated perspective, is sidelined. As a white victim, she occupies an intersection of dominance in race and subordination in gender. Instead, her character remains peripheral, robbing the narrative of an opportunity to analyse the shifting power dynamics between race and gender (and possibly class as well). The play seems to gesture toward this complexity, but eventually it just tiptoes around Islamic patriarchy and systemic Islamophobia in the West. Its rendition on child sex abuse and grooming falls as meticulous yet evasive.
While most characters feel fully realised, Sofia’s portrayal is excruciating and awful, not helped by Syed’s acting of naivety. She comes across as a flattened archetype of social media enthusiastic activist. As the story happens in 2011, the conflation of millennials and Gen Z’s blind faith in social media is confusing and unconvincing. Moreover, Sofia’s whataboutism, suggesting that most male predators are white men, is terribly misleading and out of context.
Natasha Jenkin’s thrust stage setup seems immersive but essentially naturalistic, restoring Zara’s entirely new kitchen at Royal Court’s upstairs with the most accurate details. Yet it does little to elevate Hussain’s hesitant and uneven script. Together with Richardson’s directing, the whole production feels like a thinnest wedge of a rainbow cake, bragging about its multiple layers without true texture and flavour.
Some thirty-five years ago, Gayatri Spivak raised the famous narrative of “white men saving brown women from brown men” in her famous “Can the Subaltern Speak”. She could have hardly imagined that decades later, there exists another narrative of “brown men grooming and sexually abusing white women”. Expendable tries to tackle, but it fails to draw a sample on how to answer.
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