Aaliyah (After Antigone)

Kamal Kaan’s Aaliyah (After Antigone) is a fresh take on the classic, recognising the timelessness of its themes while rooting it squarely in the here and now.

British Bangladeshi sisters Aaliyah and Imani are cleaners finishing their shift when their work is interrupted by urgent news: their brother Syeed is being deported, part of a programme of "keeping the borders safe" by home secretary Priti Pat... sorry, Parveen Parvaiz (the show has many good points, but subtlety isn’t one of them). Meanwhile, Aaliyah’s local-councillor husband has secrets of his own.

It’s a technically ambitious production. It can be watched in person or online (including via an app), with the action cutting between stage and screen as we see Parvaiz (a slick Siddiqua Akhtar) at a press conference or the sisters making social media videos to stir up support for their brother.

Halema Hussain brings a fierce conviction to the role of Aaliyah, battling both fury and fear as she navigates the quickly spiralling events. Her relationship with her sister (a sympathetic Lydia Hasoon) feels particularly genuine, the pair having a chemistry that is never quite captured between Aaliyah and her husband (Jag Sanghera, doing well in a role that feels slightly underwritten).

It’s a story fuelled by righteous anger, and it’s this that allows it to overcome its not-insignificant flaws. Alex Chisholm and Dermot Daly direct with flair, but the pacing is at times uneven, and the performances don’t always translate well on the digital platform, where in-person energy can look a little overwrought. It tackles a lot in a short run-time and might have benefited from being freed of the constraints of its classical inspiration, which makes certain elements feel forced.

But what it occasionally lacks in polish, it makes up for in passion. It’s a bold retelling that doesn’t sacrifice the specificity of its setting for the sake of universality. There’s no watering down of the sisters’ religion, culture or lived experience as working class, Muslim women from Bradford to make it more accessible to a middle class, white audience (some of the jokes are so specifically ‘Bradford’ that you can hear the in-person local audience laughing at a reference likely to go over many online viewers’ heads).

This shouldn’t feel unusual, but in a theatrical landscape so dominated by white stories, it does; and deliberately, defiantly so. In a country where citizenship is weaponised (Parvaiz repeatedly uses citizen status as both carrot and stick) and certain portions of the population will never be seen by some as quite British enough, this feels like a necessary rage, and one that we should see more of in the stories that theatre tells.