The Real Ones review – fascinating friendship zooms through decades

Waleed Akhtar’s last, Olivier-winning play was about love between two gay men. The writer’s follow-up to The P Word is another kind of love story, this one tracking a friendship between a gay man and his female best friend across two decades. It is structured in similarly episodic bursts within a circular stage, and feels like a duologue, although there are characters on the peripheries.

Neelam (Mariam Haque) and Zaid (Nathaniel Curtis, of It’s a Sin fame), are both British Pakistanis from Ilford. We initially find them working as cinema ushers, dreaming of becoming professional playwrights, dancing and getting high as 19-year-olds. The story follows them as they study, find jobs and settle down with partners: Zaid enters into a semi-surreptitious relationship with Jeremy (Anthony Howell), an older, posher white man, while Neelam marries Deji (Nnabiko Ejimofor), a British Nigerian, both of whom are sketchily drawn and a little too wooden.

Under the direction of Anthony Simpson-Pike, Curtis plays his character with an affable energy despite his stalled career as a writer along with bereavement and closeted sexuality to his family. Perhaps there is a little too much sunniness there: as lovable as he seems, not all the knocks Zaid experiences seem to land. Haque is more intense as his friend who is too angry to change her plays so that they are more amenable to white audiences, and so becomes a lawyer instead.

Akhtar creates a beguiling scenario with fast, zesty scene switching, set to bursts of energising music by Xana. But there is too much time whizzing by without a sense of progress through it.

And too many juicy themesare handled in passing, from mixed south Asian-Black relationships to coming out to Muslim Pakistani parents and the politics of writing about culture and race for white theatre commissioners.

The play treats these themes with intelligence but the touch is too breezily economical. This could easily be a TV mini-series, not only in how big it is but how moreish. The script has a pull and charisma that makes you want to keep on watching.

As it stands, it feels like a big play coiled into a little one. What it does, though, is cement Akhtar’s standing as a fearless writer with oodles of talent and bravura who can navigate plot with feeling, even if, in the end, there is too much plot for a play running under two hours.

• At the Bush theatre until 26 October .