What’s great about Shades is that you leave the theatre, having sat through two hours of astutely argued, dense, issued-based theatre, feeling like you’ve just stepped out of a Richard Curtis film. Welcome to State of the Nation theatre’s first rom-com. Shades is a neat title, too. Centred on ideas about Muslim identity within Great Britain, the word’s multiple resonances refract off every available surface that the play has to offer.

Sabrina (Stephanie Street) is a Bridget-Jones-y despairing singleton, with a great career, a gay best friend and enormous sex appeal, and only one problem – being a Muslim, she can’t find a boyfriend/potential life partner able to accept her current lifestyle or aspirations.

Enter her Muslim GBF Zain (an adorable Navin Chowdhry), who is organising a series of fundraising events in aid of Gaza. In a petty act of revenge after Sabrina is late to an initial meeting, he sets her up with the somewhat more devout Reza (the, again adorable, Amit Shah), envisaging that the pair will rub each other up the wrong way.

As it turns out, Reza is intelligent, attractive, witty and acute, while the attraction of Sabrina’s confidence, brains and beauty is not lost on Reza. Cue crisis as Sabrina’s somewhat modern lifestyle sets Reza on a crash-course with his far more observant, conservative family, as the two find themselves impossibly drawn to one another.

Alia Bano’s script is a pretty uneven affair. There are some slightly heavy-handed passages of description, exposition and argumentation. These are more than relieved, however, by her wit, intelligence and a joke-per-minute count that would put many sitcoms to shame. This buoyancy is, for the most part, maintained by Nina Raine’s snappy direction and an excellent cast. Despite the piece’s slightly naturalistic bent, the performers manage to maintain a real sense of liveness throughout. There’s a kind of in-the-moment-ness and natural-ness which brings the whole thing alive. At the same time, there is some pretty sloppy blocking that sometimes leaves someone’s back blocking our view of everyone else on stage – and no, I don’t find this ‘vital and exciting, risk-taking’; I find it galling, especially when the acting on the other side of the back is so uniformly great.

Given other recent controversies concerning plays dealing with major world religions, it is surprising Shades has not generated more protest. It is, after all, a pretty brave piece of work for a (presumably) Muslim author, with a pretty neat line in iconoclasm. Besides having a gay Muslim character who lives with his white, non-Muslim lover, there is a scene in which – angered by what he perceives as Sabrina’s increasing conservatism as she falls in love with Reza – Zain dons hijāb with niqāb and performs lap dance moves. It feels deeply subversive and confrontational – both in the world of the play, and as something for a writer to have created.

What’s interesting is how much like a Shakespeare Shades feels. Essentially, it’s Much Ado About Nothing with a bit of Othello chucked in for good measure – Reza has a nasty best friend, Ali, who stirs shit like the best Don Johns or Iagos going. What’s fascinating is how much being part of a family raises these Shakespeare comparisons.

Modern Britons have, for the most part, done a good job of cutting family ties. Sabrina is a prime example of a modern, single woman for whom her close friends are her family. Most young people can identify with her position. What Shades offers is a rare insight into the lives of those living in Britain for whom family is more important than love. At one point, Reza suggests that the reason he didn’t reject Islam, or overt expression of his faith, in the wake of 9/11 wasn’t so much idealism as his British tendency to side with the underdog. In Britain, the underdog was Islam, so his Britishness made him more Muslim. It a neat expression of a paradox that summarises the play. A play which doesn’t seek to resolve these intricate questions so much as raise them, leave them standing, and see what happens…

Till 21 February 2009