Crossing Points explores the experiences of its four protagonists as they grapple with distinct, idiosyncratic hardships that are fundamentally interlinked. Ismail, Layla, Safwan, and Yasser are all confronted with the predicament of how to move forward from the suspended moment staged before us, as they try to navigate the past intruding on their present. The audience is offered no clear denouement to any of these episodes; we become assimilated into the uncertainty that the protagonists feel, plunging into the murky currents of the river that Ismail describes as bordering “the point of no return”. When interviewing Yusuf Adia a couple weeks back, he told me that he was completely at ease with stepping back from directing the play – and it’s clear why; this was certainly an impressive directorial debut for Issac Sallé.

The play begins with Ismail (Razeen Surtee) boisterously bantering with his mates in what is aurally conveyed as a noisy pub through some light crowd noise. In actuality, the stage is only populated with boxes, props, and Ismail, who can be best described with the playwright Yusuf Adia’s own words: a character who “for the longest time wore this veil, secreting away the foreign in me… until one day I couldn’t take it off”. He is caught between his heritage and the culture he is assimilating into, making himself more palatable by adopting the Biblical name ‘Ishmael’. This is insight we are given through his recounted dialogue with Elsie, the brunette he met in the pub. Yusuf’s writing evokes the gradually defamiliarizing nature of assimilation as names are altered and curry is replaced with shepherd’s pie, microcosms of how the British ‘civilize’ immigrant ancestral cultures.

“Yusuf captures the difference between wanting to know someone’s story and learning which ‘box’ to slot someone into”

The duality of the ever-anticipated question “where are you from?” is teased apart as Yusuf captures the difference between wanting to know someone’s story and learning which ‘box’ to slot someone into –which Other to perceive them as. Razeen’s wry humour and use of vernacular suited the lad-y character archetype Ismail attempts to embody, as hard-hitting truths are delivered with the same flippancy as jokes.

The lighting, changing between warm and cold tones to differentiate Ismail’s diegetic narrative addressing the audience from the mimetic reenactment of his conversation with Elsie, was extremely effective. The jarring use of a scarf to emulate strangulation, going from accessory to a noose, was an extremely poignant way of staging a fight scene where the perpetrators are dramatically absent. The monologue ends with Ismail stepping past Caesar’s Rubicon, crossing the point of no return: “yeah, Ishmael, that’s it”. When he adopts a name that actively estranges who he is, the audience knows which side he has crossed over to.

We meet Layla (Tanya Gupta) next, a paediatrician whose daughter died in a cruel twist of fate. She’s engaged in a heated opposition with management regarding her rapid return to her job. This external conflict runs parallel with an internal divide as Layla is determined to be both ‘a kickass doctor’ and a mother, to defy the boundaries that her family prescribes. Gupta embodied Layla’s unremitting ambition and motherly tenderness extremely well. Yet, what struck most about this monologue was its focus on the translation of motherhood across cultures: “You start with mamma, then you say mum. We have amma – the honorific doesn’t progress, it doesn’t mature – it just is.”

“Crossing Points is not just about being othered racially but othered temporally; the defamiliarization of the future by the events of the past”

The most compelling actor was Eddie Luchmun as Safwan, the chatterbox in a therapist’s office. Eddie’s vitality and stage presence commands your attention and his expression of lost love is heartbreaking: “How do you respond when half of you is ripped away? Can you even begin to rebuild?” Eddie’s delivery was visceral and raw; I teared up and I haven’t even experienced a heartbreak.

Finally, we encounter Yasser, played by Dhyan Ruparel, a retired journalist whose monologue felt the most politically charged. Yasser won an award for a story about Farah, the “shining beacon” of a village in Yemen whose stories held everyone in rapture, and whose life was extinguished by a missile. This idea of winning an award for a story that isn’t one’s own and “whether winning that award made me complicit, or just… present” felt particularly relevant to the detachment between the Western journalists reporting on the tumult in the Middle East from afar.

As the play closes, all four protagonists’ backs are turned to the audience, they all hold the boxes that were stacked on the stage; emblematic of the liminal stage they occupy and the way human life can be reduced to mere possessions: “It’s odd, seeing your life packed away in the corner. Was I expecting there to be more? Me to be more?”

Crossing Points is not just about being othered racially but othered temporally; the defamiliarization of the future by the events of the past: losing your identity, child, or love; having your life packed in boxes and realizing there’s startlingly little. The play masterfully explores the experience of what happens when your imagined future is shattered, and all you can do is make the most of the fragments.