I Wanna Be Yours

Please note the title. It’s not the more usual possessive, controlling I Want You to Be Mine. It’s something else; it’s the desire to be possessed, to belong to somebody.  That is the tender hope of young Ella (Eleanor Barkla) and Haseeb (Oz Malik). Ella is from Yorkshire and Haseeb, self-consciously from south London, is British-Pakistani. They meet – or catch each other’s eye – at a drama class. 

We all know about instant attraction (don’t we?).  It’s what happens next, after that ‘first, fine, careless rapture’, that is the subject of I Wanna Be Yours.

And what happens next is about ‘love’, certainly, but it’s also about negotiating (but not calling it that), about compromise, about families, about allowing for differences, sensitivities and beliefs, about social class and race, and making plans and treading very, very carefully.  Ella is white, upbeat, and secular.  Haseeb is brown, inhibited and a practising Muslim.  If anything, Ella is the less constrained, optimistic, more accepting, and the determined driving force.

Ella and Haseeb are sweet if tentative, characters. Text and lovely, clear performances make us invest in these characters and we hope that it can all work out for them – but text and performance also sow subtle seeds of doubt from the start…    

Playwright Zia Ahmed is a London Laureate and poetry slam champion. His play charts the not always easy development of Ella and Haseeb’s relationship in a series of brief scenes distinguished by Rachel Lee’s lighting changes.  There’s not much ‘plot’ in the conventional sense – and sometimes the story meanders a little - but each little scene is beautifully attuned to the reality of his characters, truthful, and devoid of sentimentality.

The play is set in contemporary London. If you’ve not been there, Ahmed’s writing creates it for us, and director Tasnim Hossain keeps it firmly there, including the accents and speech rhythms of the characters with the help of two dialect coaches: Geraldine Cook-Dafner and London-based Gurkiran Kaur.

As the play builds to a sort of climax, there is an extended and somewhat strained metaphor about an elephant that begins as Ella’s toy and expands to become the ever present ‘elephant in the room’ for Ella and Haseeb. They even give it a name. 

In being clear about what he wants to say and explore, and not close off all possibilities, Zia Ahmed veers into a more poetic and slightly confusing allegorical reality.  As well as that elephant, Ella and Haseeb are lost in a snowstorm and then walking on ice – all rather at odds with the delicacy and naturalism of what’s gone before. 

When the Beatles sang “All You Need is Love” back in 1967 it was of course cheerful, uplifting, sentimental tosh.  As an idea, it still is.  I Wanna Be Yours puts its lovers in a context, a real milieu of class, religion and personality and asks – as the program note has it - whether love is all you need.  It’s a very contemporary love story and a cautionary tale.

Michael Brindley

Photogapher: Tiffany Garvie