[In the following review, Coles comments that Homebody/Kabul is an insightful and thought-provoking play.]

Imagine a vast but indeterminate place, an artifice cobbled out of contending cultures and histories, at once civilized and barbarian, timely and timeless, impenetrably strange and startlingly familiar. Homebody/Kabul is itself a kind of theatrical Afghanistan; it is a demanding evening, although during the week in which another American import, Madonna, made her London stage debut, it was good to be reminded that a night in the theatre can be demanding in more than one way.

Tony Kushner's play, in Cheek By Jowl's production, is about how we, in the West, engage—or fail to engage—with the Great Other. It begins with a woman sitting at a table—a simple urban tableau, designed by Nick Ormerod, which could be anywhere in Tufnell Park. She is reading from an old guide to Kabul; we hear of the city's origins, the successive waves of invaders from north, south, east and west; we learn about the Graeco-Bactrian confusion. At frequent intervals she abandons the text to make fretful digressions into hermeneutics, her marriage, her medication, deploying a vocabulary that sounds like the clues from a gnostic crossword. She is Homebody, played indefatigably by Kika Markham, who somehow manages to be compellingly boring and engagingly irritating for an entire hour, supported only by a bag of Afghan hats. These she has bought from a refugee. Afghanistan connects to the West, and as the first act ends, the stage cloth disappears down a tiny trapdoor, like water down a plughole, revealing a plain unvarnished wooden stage within a peeling stockade. Tufnell Park becomes Kabul.

It is only the first unveiling in a play full of guises, adopted and discarded, from the burkha that Homebody's daughter Priscilla is obliged to wear when she and her father Milton arrive in Kabul to look for his vanished spouse, to the unveiling of an Afghan woman who escapes to London in Act Three, only to be veiled again, differently, in a hair-do and cardigan. And Homebody's infuriating, footnoted monologue is just one example of how language itself conceals as it reveals. When we meet Milton at the beginning of Act Two, he is being addressed by an Afghan doctor, who describes with terrible, impersonal precision the state of Homebody's absent corpse; a little later, Priscilla encounters an Afghan poet, who writes in Esperanto so that “all people might be one”. But if you are unfamiliar with Esperanto or the ghazal-form, how do you know what you're listening to, or reading? What use is a post-mortem on a person who might not be dead?

Kushner, with a typical flourish, uses the same device in reverse, to make the unintelligible intelligible. We encounter a character we recognize from news footage; an Afghan woman in a paroxysm of hair-tearing, breast-beating anguish—Mahala, played by Souad Faress—but it is she who makes sense. In another scene which recalls the news, Mahala trembles on the ground in her burkha while a Talib stands over her, aiming his Kalashnikov at her head. All is confusion, illuminated by moments of terrible clarity. Some of these moments take place off stage. September 11, which occurred after the play was written, is prefigured when Mahala rages: “You love the Taliban so much then bring them to New York! Well, don't worry. They're coming to New York!” Five hundred pairs of feet shifted uncomfortably.

Kushner has always had an extraordinary feel for the moment. His Pulitzer prize-winning two-part play Angels in America succeeded, like no other drama of the 1980s, in dramatizing the catastrophe of AIDS even as it was happening, connecting the progress of a virus to American domestic policy, to homosexuality and the Republican Party, to angelology in a secular age. In that play and in this, he sometimes fails to pay full price for his effects, beguiling us into an exchange of sympathies about which we may later feel uncomfortable. An idea (or an angel) appears and we are charmed, surprised, delighted, reassured; then, just as the temperature begins to drop, Kushner cleverly makes a joke, or points to its opposite. Priscilla makes a confession to her father and we feel the energies of that confession at work in the scene and in the audience; but her father, it turns out, is stoned beyond comprehension. We're let off the hook (we've had our fun anyway).

These strategies take time to unfold, which makes for a difficult and involved evening, although the director, Declan Donnellan, whose Avignon production of Le Cid was a miracle of freedom and organization, knows when to hold and when to release. It is worth turning out just for that; but to come away from a long evening in a London theatre thinking differently (thinking at all) about Tufnell Park and Kabul is a lot more than merely worthwhile.