Theatre: Speed and Apex Predator by dramatists to watch

Course correction – Two dramatists to watch

Speed
Bush Theatre, London
Apex Predator
Hampstead Theatre, London

In the excellent thriller movie Speed (1994), Keanu Reeves played an LA cop who boards a bus wired with a bomb that will explode if the vehicle travels at less than 50mph. Conversely, in a new play with the same title, lives will be saved if the central characters can be persuaded to drive more slowly. Faiza, Samir and Harleen are attending a DVLA speed awareness course in the dingy basement of a Holiday Inn.

Those who have attended such a course (I speak from what is now called “lived experience”) can face moral censure from those who view themselves as the purest road users, but the point is that we are not the worst. Serious speedsters gain three points or lose their licence; those who only fractionally trigger the speed gun are spared the penalty if they cooperate with three hours of videos, role-play and data.

That gives a redemptive context to Speed, a second play by Mohamed-Zain Dada, whose impressive 2023 Royal Court debut Blue Mist examined the motives of a film-maker working on a documentary about the radicalisation of Islamic men. Speed has a simi­lar structure, with a trio under scrutiny by a possibly suspect fourth: course leader Abz.

Presumably in case too many in the audience share my lived experience, Dada injects surprise by presenting a fictional variation on the usual contrition exercise: this more extreme module features participants who already have nine points, have also been charged with violent or aggressive driving, will be required to retake their theory course and must convince Abz that their anger has been managed. That adds a tension, absent from standard driver contrition, about what each person might have done. Elements that feel not quite right – all three drivers being from the Pakistani community, Abz keeping his mobile on despite confiscating the participants’ – are satisfyingly twisted and, along with the aggression back-stories, finally explained.

The characters are well delineated by writer and actors – dapper but anxious Abz (Nikesh Patel); Faiza (Shazia Nicholls), a hyperactive entrepreneur who has been on Dragons’ Den; Samir (Arian Nik), a delivery driver who has the wrong profession for his temperament; and nurse Harleen (Sabrina Sandhu), the most intriguingly mysterious of those who face losing their wheels. Confirming the promise of Blue Mist, Speed identifies Dada as a dramatist to watch.

Having lost its Arts Council England grant, Hampstead Theatre needs to grow potential commercial transfers, but Apex Predator by John Donnelly – who had a success with his 2014 play about a gay footballer, The Pass – feels like the sort of show you might see opening directly in a small venue off Shaftesbury Avenue.

The cast includes a co-star with a high social media profile – broadcaster and actor Laura Whitmore, who appeared in Danny Robins’ 2:22: A Ghost Story – and aims for the plot and tone of a similar tingler. Whitmore is Ana, a young mother struggling with postpartum depression, who is offered succour (some of it alarming) by Mia (Sophie Melville), the teacher of her elder child. As their interactions begin to bite, it’s clear which very popular cultural genre we are in, and blood soon flows over the stage, despite the absence of knives and guns.

Donnelly interestingly explores masculinity and maternity and (again echoing 2:22) entertainingly challenges our certainty about what we are seeing but, paradoxically, a show that seems engineered for the West End feels too slight and in need of fleshing out to go there.