This Muslim playwright believes Yorkshire is headed for civil war

Expendable, at the Royal Court, is an urgent bulletin from the front line of the grooming gang scandal in the north of England. The setting is a kitchen in Yorkshire where Zara is trying to keep her family together after her son, Raheel, was outed as a rape suspect by a national newspaper. White thugs dump parcels of excrement on their porch and Zara cowers under the kitchen table, too scared to answer the door. The racists have mounted a mass demonstration, supported by the cops, which causes local bus services to be cancelled.

Every Muslim in town is terrified of a white vigilante gang who recently targeted a blameless Yemeni pensioner and kicked him to death. It gets worse. Zara and her daughter, Sofia, join a peaceful counter-demonstration, but the heavy-handed cops arrest ten innocent Muslims and charge them with violent disorder. Meanwhile, the white thugs are free to scrawl ‘Rape capital of the UK’ across the side of the local mosque. Then they burn it to the ground. The useless cops arrest three of the white rioters as a token gesture. This vision of a Britain where law-abiding Muslims are hunted in the streets while English vigilantes commit arson and murder with impunity may not reflect the facts on the ground. But this is how a Muslim dramatist sees our society and she deserves attention. Her play is very easy to follow because her stiff, simplistic characters keep making clunky speeches that explain the over-elaborate plot in minute detail.