Peaceophobia, Here East

Peaceophobia, currently running at Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Car Park as part of The Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, is an unexpected mashup of car-show and peppy interactive site-specific theatre. Written and performed by three witty and charismatic petrolheads from Bradford, the piece is part reflection on the lived experience of growing up against a backdrop of racism, and part paean to the power of a souped-up racer to bring meaning to difficult lives. The combination of prose, poetry, rap, talking motors, and magic tricks does not always work, but it is inventive and genuine, and powered by a burning urge to communicate something of importance.

Thankfully, at the outset of the 60-minute show the three protagonists (Mohammad Ali Yunis, Casper Ahmed, and Sohail Hussain) provide a clear protocol for showing the due level of respect for their impressively modified vehicles. No touching the Cupra, because it leaves fingerprints on a vehicle that has taken a day to polish. No insulting the Golf; it may not be to your tastes, but it is somebody’s dream motor and boy, do the guys know a lot about the history of Golfs. Even the dodgy-looking Vauxhall Nova, which starts off in broken pieces and is built-up on stage before our eyes, deserves a due measure of regard.

“We break it down and we build it up” is the recurring theme of the show. It is a reflection on one strategy which the men adopt to manage their frequent encounters with racism and Islamophobia. By subsuming a part of their identity in a positive process of creation, they challenge and overcome. Building up your car is a cipher for building up your life. For a community that is, as they remind us, “simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible”, it is clear there is much more to ‘building it up’ than making your motor look flashy. It is a form of freedom.

The litany of casual and often unthinking intolerance that the men describe is depressingly familiar. Endless police stop and searches, the assumption that anyone with a flashy car is a drug-dealer, random arrests and equally random releases without charge, tipsy white girls who pull on their beards for a laugh, everyday racist comments from fellow dog-walkers; it is all there. But at its heart this is a positive and uplifting piece, set to a superb soundtrack and packed with humour. It feels under-rehearsed, there is an occasional technical hitch, and it comes apart a bit at the end, but so what.

You may not get many opportunities in life to visit a show in a car park by the A12. Carpe Diem.

8 September 2022

Duration: 65 minutes. No interval

This Review First Appeared in The Reviews Hub