The five teenage protagonists of Atiha Sen Gupta’s first full-length play, What Fatima Did, are a multicultural, comprehensive-school version of the Brady Bunch. They are funny, pop-culture savvy, slightly obnoxious, mildly disrespectful of authority but only to the point where someone tells them to stop being silly. Most importantly, they are blissfully unaware of their differences - until, that is, their friend Fatima comes back from summer break wearing a hijab.

This is the one event that sets this play in motion and sustains it throughout, and it is also the one event that everyone will be talking and fussing about for the almost two very long hours of recriminations and fights. Everyone except Fatima herself, who never appears on stage. In a flourishing of more or less politically correct discussions and explorations of just how liberal and worldly each one is, the group fractures, and it turns out that their last months before university will not go just as they had planned. George, who was Fatima’s boyfriend during the previous year, struggles to understand her choice and to accept her elusive behaviour, and ends up twirling around suspiciously nationalist positions. Fatima’s brother Mohammed (played by Arsher Ali one yard in front of every one else’s performance) wavers between his love and loyalty towards his sister, and the secular beliefs he was brought up with and always thought he would stick to. Ms Harris is the Guardian-reading teacher who tries to sit these kids around a table and have them talking about freedom of religious expression, not without throwing in her personal experience as girlfriend of an Iranian man whose female relatives are all forced to cover their heads.

The play was written by a very young woman and is interpreted by more young men and women, yet I have not been out of high school long enough to find their attitudes believable. The overall impression is like Dawson’s Creek set in a comprehensive inner-city high school doing an episode on religious differences.  The dialogues are static and redundant, the scenes are abundant and all endless, the fights, both verbal and physical, are dragged on and on. A few jokes out of the many jokes made at the expense of poor Stacey, who is the least sharp tool in the box, seem to demand the presence of a studio audience coming straight from a 1990s sitcom to whistle and clap and laugh. It is surprising and weirdly fascinating to discover how those same British teenagers who appear to scare a good part of the adult population out of telling them off for dropping litter or destroying bus stops, and who are presented as so dark and messed up in other media, often become idiotically comic, formless characters on a theatrical stage. Where is the real tension? Where are the backstabbing and the awkward social prowling?

We receive a glimpse of it towards the end of the evening, when a frustrated George risks Fatima having him expelled on the grounds of racist bullying. This is when all the momentum that we seemed to have been building up to should appear. Unfortunately, the climax is then completely undermined by an overwritten scene in which Mohammed acts as a messenger between George and his sister, in and out the door of a flat - because Fatima is never on stage, but she is occasionally supposed to be present, though we do not hear her. Admittedly, this is the only scene where the choice of hiding her seems dubious, as during the rest of the evening it actually seems to be a clever and interesting touch - but here, it makes the production look like a game with imaginary friends.

If there is a message to be discerned from What Fatima Did, it would appear to be that a young woman’s decision to adopt radical positions in her religious behaviour can result in a network of previously idyllic friendships being shattered, in a boy risking expulsion from school because of the absurdities of political correctness, and in general tearful mayhem. While this might be a bit worrying, it is even more worrying to think that this might not be the message that was intended at all. There are many ideas evoked by the text and thrown out at us, political and social ideas, and complex questions on freedom of expression and secularism, and what state schools have a right to impose, and the way in which 9/11 amplified previously unnoticed differences. It is admirable that Aitha Sen Gupta was not afraid to tackle all these themes in her first long work, and surely at least some of its defects derive from the messiness of the issue at hand. Nonetheless, if this play is ready to be staged in a full-scale production at the Hampstead, it should also be held accountable for all its many, deafening problems.

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