Liberation Squares review – polemic comedy about state surveillance
The three GCSE students in Sonali Bhattacharyya’s play are well versed in comic book heroes and ninja warriors. They are steeped in Moon Girl, Kid Kree and Ms Marvel. They also know about the warp effects of The Matrix and the idea of precrime in Minority Report. What does not occur to them, any more than the need to put their ninja skills into practice, is that they may be accused of a precrime themselves.
Orwellian though thoughtcrime sounds, it is the foundation of the government’s Prevent strategy in England and Wales. Designed to weed out radicalisation before it happens, it requires education and health workers to look out for the early signs of extremism among the people they work with. Amnesty International says it has a “chilling effect on human rights”.
The problem – in addition to Islamophobia and the false conflation of one religion with violence – is the impossibility of predicting which thoughts will set someone on the slippery slope to fundamentalism. In the play, when TikTok activist Xara (Halema Hussain) educates her 20,000 followers about history’s powerful women, among them Begum Hazrat Mahal, a leader of the 19th-century Indian rebellion against the British, the system cannot distinguish between feminist empowerment and incitement to terrorism. The authorities are not even sure if she means Shamima Begum.
Along with the beatboxing Ruqaya (Vaneeka Dadhria) and the bookish Sabi (Asha Hassan), Xara finds herself under surveillance after a petulant online outburst that flags up her expertise in revolutionary thinkers. The three are such unlikely suspects, it takes a while for them to figure out what future crime they are a match for. Their innocence and cluelessness show up the absurdity of the policy.
Directed by Milli Bhatia for Fifth Word and Nottingham Playhouse, it is an uneven piece of work that skirts around its central theme with tales of school bus bullying, the tensions of teenage friendship and a lament for the loss of traditional libraries. For added drama, it builds to an action-adventure heist that would make Ms Marvel proud. Its real polemical power, though, is in an agitprop sequence about Prevent, which, even it if feels disconnected from the rest, gives the play its bite and purpose.
• At Nottingham Playhouse until 27 April. Then touring.
