"Three women have been called in for assessment. Sara looks kind of Asian, Scheherazade is kind of Middle Eastern, and Sarah is kind of white. But how British are they?" Such is the premise of Octopus, a play set in a near dystopian future, where Brexit has happened, Scotland has left the UK and citizens without 'indigenous' parents and grandparents must report for an assessment. Octopus wields bureaucratic jargon adeptly, capturing a Kafka-esque world where a few words can make the difference between deportation and entering the 'pre-criminal space'. As (mostly) white character Sarah puts it, in a fit of pique at the absurdity of it all "It's enough to want to join a café latte'.
The three characters are broadly drawn; Sara is a clear type-A, a tightly-wound right-wing accountant who is slowly but surely infected by the assessment bureau's energy, and ends up being the first to enter the actual "criminal space". Scheherazade is a dyslexic tapestry-weaver, with a love of post-punk bands, who hopes her half-Jewish and half-Iranian heritage will "cancel each other out". Sarah, meanwhile is the quintessential white feminist, who keeps putting her foot in it and increasingly shows her rampant racism. There's an incredibly uncomfortable scene where she attempts to bond with Sara by listing all the curry dishes she can think of. There's a twist of course, for this oh-so-British character. Sarah, it turns out, is not as white as she thinks. This prompts one of several identity crises.
Music is a large part of this play, to the extent that the assessor complains that she keeps getting sung at by the three women. As well as song outbursts, each scene transition takes us into an underwater state where well-known songs are distorted and made strange. The whole culminates into an almost hysterical mash-up of their individual anthem songs ('Just a spoonful of sugar', 'They're changing the guards at Buckingham Palace', 'God save the Queen', and more…). A union jack umbrella is opened by Sarah to match the slashed leggings of Scheherazade, and the three find themselves bonding over the unfairness of the system. Is it a little too neat? Yes. Is it fun? Hell yes.
While the acting suffers from caricature at times, Afsaneh Gray has some wonderful zingers in her script that keep it zipping on. One of the biggest belly laughs of the night was Scheherazade's declaration that she will join the Islamic State: "that's what they're called now, they keep changing their names, like the artist formerly known as Prince". Yet this joke reveals one of several plot holes too – it only works if we set the play in our actual present rather than this supposed dystopian future.
The octopus of the title refers to the discovery that octopuses have alien DNA in them, and while the play is far from perfect, it's hard not to warm to that sentiment: yes, we are all octopuses, long may we live.