Peanut Butter & Blueberries is an unassuming Muslim campus romance

All the references to Frantz Fanon, colonialism and other hipster elements of the zeitgeist might suggest this two-hander is about to turn into a forced march around Speakers’ Corner. The good news is that the debut play by the author and activist Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan has a more emollient side to it. Strip away the predictable rhetoric and what is left is the outline of an unassuming romance about two devout young Muslims who meet on campus and embark on a tentative relationship.
The performances are gently persuasive. Humera Syed is particularly impressive as Hafsah, a hijab-wearing Bradford feminist who is immersed in a master’s in gender studies (groan) at London University’s Soas. There, she finds herself drawn to down-to-earth Brummie Bilal (Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain) even though she disapproves of the way he allows others to call him “Billy” — it is, she sniffs, his way of seeking “white approval”.
Both characters are caught between two worlds. (The play’s title is a reference to the sandwich that brings them together.) Their relationship proceeds at a decorous pace. There are no bedroom romps, not even a kiss. The nearest they come to intimate contact is the moment Bilal gently removes her glasses and cleans them. But by the time Hafsah disappears to New York on a writing fellowship (yes, in some ways this is a very bourgeois slice of life) we sense that Bilal’s fractured family relationships are becoming more and more of a barrier.
From time to time the actors address the audience directly. In this pared-back production — the last programmed by Indhu Rubasingham before heading to the National — the director Sameena Hussain presents us with a bare stage on which a revolve delivers a few props, from a park bench to bean bags. The passages when the couple break into choreographed bouts of running add a distracting aura of workshopping to a piece that works best when it focuses on simpler human interactions.
It’s a pity, too, that Manzoor-Khan feels obliged to add an implausible terrorism-related plot twist. Browse her website and you’ll find that the author of Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia calls for an end to “the global system of white supremacy, imperialism and capitalism that make the majority of lives on earth unlivable”. You sometimes feel those ideas seeping into this script. The actors, thankfully, do their best to keep them at bay.★★★☆☆85minTo August 31, kilntheatre.comFollow @timesculture to read the latest reviews