Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Dummy in Diaspora
Esho Rasho
Genre: LGBTQ, New Writing
Venue: Zoo Playground
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A fascinating, engaging and beautifully delivered theatrical piece on being an Iraqi gay. It engages form the outset and brings all of the theatre arts into play with great skill. It leaves you with greater understanding and sympathy for a man seeking truth in a community which is still able to love him.
Review
As a performer Esho Rasho is a fantastic raconteur. From the very beginning this is a beautifully crafted and perfectly poised production, both in the text and the performance. You become drawn into his world easily and with great skill. It does not take long before you really do feel the joy, which he has in exploring the issues both of his youth and his family. It transcends the expected as we get his worry and his hopes whilst his mother appears regularly to inject her own hopes for him – getting married being principal amongst them.
Having known he was gay from around the age of five, holding that truth within a traditional Middle Eastern society must have been a relatively heavy burden, however the humanity and love he brings to the portrayal of his mother may make you worry that she may struggle with the news but feel the love she has for her son. It feels like this is a familial liberation as much as a personal one. The news of her cancer becomes quite painful for us as we have invested in a character who may portray what we feel are clearly Middle Eastern parental traits, but it is Rasho’s skill that I felt the pain myself. It is well observed playing with our prejudices in a playful manner but avoiding any form of blame of cliché.
Having a gay son, and a couple of other gay children, I love learning more about the journeys of others. I shall never be stupid enough to believe that I was the perfect parent – I know that I was not – but the arrogance of being a westerner who believes these “kinds of things” are more tolerated within our societies and communities whilst calling others backwards has never been part of my thinking or vocabulary. I am wholly surprised and delighted at the tolerance shown by those we seek to demonise for the diversity others within my community seek to destroy.
This adds to that narrative. By the end I have become more educated emotionally by the story and more importantly by the way in which it has been structured in the telling. It is poised and delivered with grace. There is respect given to those around him as he emerges into himself and that is also clear when Sonny makes his entrance. The couple are now real and no longer imagined as Rasho makes the two of them appear more than solid reflections of characters, but real people imagined on a stage in dark box but alive in our minds.
Sequences are well directed jointly between Rasho himself and Hallie Snowday, with some delicate balances in play, the use of soundscape – musical arrangements by C Mikhail are augmented by some nice voiceovers from Veronique Le – enhances it all and by the end it is a lovely piece of solo work inhabited by many creatives but delivered by the best person to tell the story – the man himself.
