67. Stock Da'Wa - Hampstead Theatre

I must admit I really struggled with Stock Da’Wa – I felt like there was an interesting grain of an idea held within the story and performances but it had got lost in an overly melodramatic storyline and some questionable political overtones. To explain why, I’m going to go into some detail and though the play is over, if you don’t want to be spoiled for possible future revivals I wouldn’t read on.


At it’s heart, the Stock Da’Wa is a play both about unhealthy relationships formed in people’s teenage years and the lies that can be at the centre of friendships and the damage of revealing them after they’ve been entrenched for years. The focus of the story is the return of Paul (Gary Shelford) to his almost-adopted mother, Joan (Ann Mitchell), whom he hasn’t contacted since he left for university. The play reveals that the relationship, which initially appears warm and charitable, was in fact manipulative, unhealthy and borderline sexual particularly following the death of Joan’s own son. The revelation, whose fractures run through the second half of the play, is that Paul in fact murdered the possibly suicidal son, whose memory Joan has enshrined and willingly and self-gratifyingly martyred herself to. This turns out to be a fact known and hidden by Mr Wilson (Robin Soans), Joan’s closest friend, who is staying at the house – Paul’s teacher and, as we later learn, almost sexual partner during the boys university years. Joan is as betrayed by the hiding of the relationship and the contact whilst Paul was at uni as she is by the discovery of the murder. Paul himself is clearly struggling to accept the damage these relationships have done to himself and to his relationship with his real family.


All of which is fascinating to me – particularly the look at the unhealthy way relationships and secrets can damage us even years later and I have the feeling that if this had been a relatively simple exploration of how they can continue to mess us up I would have loved it, particularly if it had been revealed that Paul had been just as manipulative as the others.

But where this fell apart for me is that Paul had also converted to Islam since they had last met him and became an extremist. He arrived at the house covered in blood and carrying a bag containing the decapitated head of one of Mr. Wilson’s lovers. I just couldn’t work out what this added to the story and for me it meant that the entire scenario was played only at the level of extreme danger, removing the possibility of a variety of tones, emotions and character moments. I also couldn’t shake how uncomfortable the extremity of the portrayal made me – it felt very unsubtle and as if it was confirming the fears the Axis Against Terror would have, at their worst, wished us to believe. And whilst I feel the theatre is a great medium to explore the conflicts and otherwise between cultures – this is not how I would want it done.

That said, I thought the performances were routinely good, the set simple but effective, the basic idea sound if used badly and I really loved the studio space (very reminiscent of Trafalgar Studios 2), which I hadn’t been to before. So the evening wasn’t a complete loss.