Foal review – British Asian’s search for belonging ripples between tenderness and rage

Finborough theatre, London
Titas Halder’s raw solo play relays one young man’s feverish struggle in the face of racism, deftly played by Amar Chadha-Patel in his stage debut

Titas Halder’s striking new one-man play is about a young British Asian man, A.K., growing up in Britain and experiencing increasingly brutal incidents of racism: bullying in the playground; casual jibes at work; parents who no longer feel safe in their family home. And at the centre of it all: a funny and sensitive man, struggling to find himself and fracturing in two.

This is a strangely arresting production but there are some issues too. It feels like there’s a fairly specific play hiding in here but we’re only given scraps of details. A.K. spends his youth growing up on unnamed “Island” and later moves to the city, where he lives in a dingy flat on Seven Sisters Road. There are fleeting references to Walkmans in his childhood and, later, an allusion to the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes but the writing wavers between a feverish nightmare and something much more grounded and political.