If you put four people from different racial, religious, class backgrounds in a room and ask them to engage with each other now that they're all decidedly upper class, and have much to lose and gain from their relationships with each other, what happens? That's one question asked by Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced, among the questions of race and wealth and power and fear and greed.
It's a play of ideas, sure, but it's mainly a play of what happens when people's perspectives, histories and futures collide. We see Amir (Sachin Joab) denounce the Muslim faith, while his wife Emily (Sophie Ross), who is white, and thus possesses no cultural background elucidated here, embraces it in her art (in a way that does seem appropriating), showing that work to a Jewish curator (Glenn Hazeldine), whose wife, Jory (Paula Arundell), is African-American and works with Amir. As good a place as any to start a fight about politics and religion and their place in a post-9/11 world. But this fighting is all that carries the play, rather than the relationships between characters. We're not given, as an audience, a reason to care for any of them, or their feelings for each other. And it doesn't seem to come down to the efforts of a cast using their best American accents, or the assiduous directing of Sarah Goodes - it comes down to an absence in the play itself. A work sure to be divisive, sure to get bums on seats, but one that seems to lack heart.
