Read this Brown Boys Swim review and catch it in Newbury
Brown Boys Swim at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford, from September 21-23 and will tour to the Corn Exchange from October 17-18. Review by JON LEWIS
OXFORD playwright Karim Khan’s 2022 Edinburgh Fringe First-winning play Brown Boys Swim, excitingly directed by John Hoggarth for the North Wall Arts Centre (built over a swimming pool), is a spellbinding buddy story of two Muslim sixth-formers in Oxford, friends who are as close as brothers, who share a Punjabi heritage.
We first see the boys dancing joyfully to bhangra tunes from DJ Rags, Mystik and DJ H. The newly shaven-headed, outgoing and boastful Kash (Kashif Ghole) is planning to study for an apprenticeship in Manchester aimed at BAME students while his best friend, the more studious, cautious Mohsen (Ibraheem Hussain) wishes to stay in the city to study at what he says is the best university in the world.
However, more pressing for them, in one month’s time there is a pool party they are belatedly invited to. Their fellow student, Jess, initially left them off the party list.
More worryingly, they discover that they were subsequently invited because they are culturally stereotyped as drug dealers, expected to supply the guests. They face more discrimination when they shop for speedos. An initially comic scene turns threatening when a store detective calls in the police because Kash is carrying a wad of money, quite legally.
The party, and swimming, demonstrate the boys’ status as ‘others’ within the wider town environment, their identity reinforced by the infusion of Muslim and Punjabi words in their conversations.
They refer to a community memorial about the drowning of a Muslim teenager in the Thames, a brown boy who couldn’t swim.
The party gives the boys another reason, beyond safety, to learn.
Hoggarth, and his movement director Sita Thomas, create mesmeric scenes in the pool, the boys clinging on to the sides of the tiled pool walls (designer James Button) or climbing on benches, the invisible water splashing loudly (sound designer Roshan Gunga) as the boys appear to float in the pool.
Here they are again objects of suspicion because, they think, everyone else knows brown boys cannot swim, so what are they doing there? The tragic ending comes as a shock.
A wonderful, engaging, production.
Brown Boys Swim will tour to the Corn Exchange from October 17-18