by David Greig
Directed by Philip Howard
Harbourfront 08 World Stage
Presents The Traverse Theatre Company
Presentation at the Premiere Dance Theatre
April 22-26, 2008

    It begins intriguingly enough. Paul, a Scottish TOEFL writer-salesman, arrives rumpled, reluctant, and exhausted in Damascus on Valentine’s Day in order to sell his company’s new second-language textbooks to Wasim, ex-radical poet turned bureaucrat, who is dean of a Syrian school but with bitter political beliefs. Paul would rather be back home with his wife, and he fully expects to stay only a day to close the business deal. However, things go very much awry. He has to deal with a talkative front desk clerk and porter, Zacharia, who is overly eager to sell Hollywood his film-script of his own life. Then there’s Muna, Wasim’s colleague and ex-flame, who challenges Paul’s false assumptions of Middle East life and politics while managing to fall in love with him. A bomb attack on the local airport delays Paul even further. This thumbnail summary hardly does justice to the play’s political grain, but the playwright himself goes awry in the course of a very long (2 hours 20 minute) tale that reaches for far more than it successfully grasps.

   The play observes the classic unities of time, place, and action, but it unravels in the process. Set entirely in the lobby of a Damascus hotel (designed with symbolic portent by Anthony MacIlwaine) where a flat-screen television broadcasts Al Jazeera, it offers a very annoying choric figure in the form of Elena, a Ukrainian transsexual cocktail pianist who delivers portentous monologues that are sometimes satirical but more often than not hopelessly hysterical. The role is performed with attack by Dolya Gavanski but to such excess that she seems to be assaulting the audience as well. The first act is marked by pointed political and psychological satire—somewhat in the manner of Brian Friel’s Translations (where the problems of culture and language are intertwined) but without his compelling social world and wit. The second act is a huge letdown—not only in terms of the pyrotechnical ending that is anticipated on the basis of press reports of a technical complication with stage fire, but in terms of the play’s substance as well. We are meant to see how most of the characters change, at least in their assumptions and attitudes, but apart from a very striking scene in which Muna and Paul come to an understanding of each other’s culture by a rhetorical exchange in various verb tenses, the story gets bogged down in trivia, such as Paul’s last-night debauch.

   The acting helps to keep an audience interested. As Paul, Ewen Bremner has a puppy-dog vulnerability and charm, so his culture-shock and psychological stress are funny as well as acute. Nathalie Armin makes Muna intriguingly ambiguous, playing her as a mixture of stern critic and clever feminist, temptress, and affectingly vulnerable Palestinian woman. And Khalid Laith’s Zacharia is amusing and touching, though his role never really develops beyond the first signals of yearning for a better life. As Wasim, Alex Elliott has a very credible Arab accent and demeanour, though one wishes that his politics were given sharper play and not left on much the same plane as his frustrated passion for Muna. However, the pacing of the piece begins to lag, and the production finally fizzles to a melodramatic close.       

photoL Alan McCredie
pic 1: Dolya Gavanski as Elena
pic 2:: Alex Elliott (Wasim) and Nathalie Armin (Muna)



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