'Peanut Butter & Blueberries' review – two terrific performers deliver this sweet and unusual romance

Read our review of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan's play Peanut Butter & Blueberries, now in performances at the Kiln Theatre to 31 August.

Peanut butter and blueberries might seem an odd combination. In fact, that happens to be a favourite sandwich of the 25-year-old Brummie, Bilal (Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain), whose gathering attraction to the 23-year-old Hafsah (Humera Syed) is the topic of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s very sweet play.

Practising Muslims both, the duo are nonetheless as potentially unlikely a pairing as the conjoined foodstuffs of the title. But who’s to say that romance can’t be as surprisingly arrived at as a something new to tickle the palate? Fellow students at SOAS in London, the two become soulmates.

Across 80 minutes, we track the deepening feelings between two people for whom, a note in the playtext advises, Islam provides a context for the drama, though not its topic. Manzoor-Khan’s abiding interest lies in the playfulness, and the perils, that accompany burgeoning attraction, and she’s blessed to have two performers whose winning and ready rapport carries the writing across the finish line.

We’re aware from the outset of Hafsah – or Hafs, as Bilal calls her – catching the eye of his classmate: she’s the studious sort who can be shy one minute, garrulous the next, and the prevalence of direct address to the audience allows us access to their feelings throughout the “roller coaster” (a decisive image) of emotion experienced across a year.

Physical affection isn’t on offer: there’s no first kiss or holding of hands, Instead, we sense respect between the two ramping up toward a point where it just might lead on to romance. That process is abetted by Hafsah getting to know Bilal’s flatmate, Abdulla, who isn’t quite prepared for the feminist firebrand in his midst. Gender Studies is her specialty, South Asia Studies his, which means immersing himself in languages (Hindi, Urdu) in which he has no interest.

The hijab-wearing Hafsah knows her mind and is quick to note – for starters – Bilal’s willingness to be called Billy in a move towards nominal assimilation. But he possesses a no-less-firm sense of self. An exchange with an unnamed man in a campus library escalates quickly, as does a rendingly described experience on a train where a stranger turns against Bilal, much to his (and our) dismay: the realities of suspicion, and worse, given their grievous due.

At times, one wishes less of the story were reported so that we could fully enjoy the twosome’s discovery of one another in the moment, alongside the unanticipated conversational byways – neatly caught here – from which a relationship might spring.

The director Sameena Hussain works double time to keep the performers moving this way and that about the space: a slightly less fussy staging might help, and the design seems functional at best.

But the play is terrifically served by both its players. A bespectacled Syed is especially lovely in the scene in which she approaches the tricky subject of marriage, only to be met by a response she could in no way have foreseen. And Hussain deftly illuminates a traumatic backstory to Bilal that is nonetheless accompanied at every turn by palpable tenderness.

The play not only occupies unusual, and welcome terrain, but it marks a farewell of programming at the Kiln from Indhu Rubasingham, who has since been appointed the incoming artistic director of the National. New voices and faces are welcome wherever they may appear, and one senses some highly satisfying times on the South Bank ahead.

Peanut Butter & Blueberries is at the Kiln Theatre to 31 August. Book Peanut Butter & Blueberries tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Peanut Butter & Blueberries (Photos by Oluwatosin Daniju)