This play is selling fast. Before you've even read this review you might want to pop a few tickets in your web-basket, all ready to press 'buy' once you've finished reading. There's even a good chance it'll have sold out by the time we've finished writing this, but we'll tell you about it anyway because it deserves this hype and is really a must-see for any theatre buff.
Disgraced starts like this: Amir, a successful lawyer from Pakistan enjoys an incredibly comfortable life in New York with his equally successful artist wife Emily. Emily takes inspiration for her work from Islam, the religion of Amir's home country, which is a sore point to him as it is a faith he renounced and now scoffs at.
The play's climax comes at a most wonderfully constructed dinner scene, where an art curator interested in Emily's work and his wife (a colleague of Amir's) come over to dine. This pivotal scene is the undoing of everyone present, and is quite honestly one of the most well-written and powerful scenes to have hit the stages of London this year.
Disgraced isn't for the weak-minded or the faint-hearted; this play bites to the heart of several contentious subjects and does so so pointedly that it had people gasping aloud. Centred purely on dialogue (a play then not for those more inclined to action than words), the script is biting and bristling with intelligence, truly a bravado of play-writing. The playwright Ayad Akhtar won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for this, and it's been met with a furor of critical appraisal from both sides of the Atlantic so what are you waiting for; we'll have our fingers crossed that there are still tickets for you.
Disgraced is running at Bush Theatre, Shepherd's Bush until 29 June, tickets £10-£19.50. For more information visit the Bush Theatre website. Londonist saw this on a complimentary press ticket.
