Review: Snookered - Edinburgh Traverse Theatre

UNITY of time, unity of place, unity of action. Ishy Din’s new 90-minute play for the London-based Tamasha company, playing its only Scottish dates at the Traverse this weekend, obeys all the rules of classical drama; yet it stands as a powerful reminder that writers don’t always need brand-new forms to tackle vital contemporary themes.

Snookered is set around a pub pool table in a deadbeat northern town, where four Asian guys meet for an evening to remember the birthday of a dead friend. There’s Billy, no longer in touch with his family after a row over a girl forced him into exile in London. There’s Shaf, big, married, four kids, crazy drinker, apparently doomed to a life as a hometown taxi-driver. There’s Kamy, determined to make something of the family butcher’s shop he’s inherited; and there’s Mo, Shaf’s brother-in-law and family golden boy, because of his junior management job in a Comet store.

And as the four exchange news, play snooker, and indulge in some hard-hitting banter, they soon begin to reveal more than is comfortable about the extreme pressures under which they live: the pressure to drink and not to drink, to embrace their Muslim faith or to reject it, to integrate or to remain different, to marry and have children; and above all, the economic pressure to succeed and provide.

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It’s a familiar formula for a drama; but given four beautifully-drawn characters, well played by Iqbal Khan’s powerful cast, a fierce stream of expletive-stained street language, and plenty of wry humour, Din’s play emerges as a powerful and satisfying drama. It is one that gives full weight to a dimension of British life that needs the safe space of theatre in which to explore its tensions, expose the familiar human pain that fuels them, and perhaps begin the process of healing.

Rating: ****

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