FringeReview UK 2024
Gigi & Dar
Arcola Theatre, Dalston
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Arcola Theatre, Studio 2
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Josh Azouz’s Gigi & Dar directed by Kathryn Hunter till November 2nd in Arcola’s Studio 2. Compelling and unanswerable, it’s more humane than recent history in several parts of the world allow. Setting it in 2016, Azouz knows history itself has been overtaken. Highly recommended.
Till November 2nd
Review
“Now I know what you’re thinking” Dar addresses the audience, a fourth wall sometimes invoked, sometimes forgotten. “Where are the gun towers? Where are the dogs? Yeh we don’t need that. We’ve been dropped in a desert.” Intense light and light fatigues suggest checkpoint 432 is certainly in a desert.
An umbrella shades two deckchairs. 20-year-old Dar (Lola Shalam) and 19-year-old Gigi (Tanyi Virmani) could be anywhere in the world where doing national service is compulsory. Though Josh Azouz’s Gigi & Dar directed by Kathryn Hunter till November 2nd in Arcola’s Studio 2 steals in a few hints and it is “a contested land”.
It’s one day in 2016, six days to go till their release. Till it isn’t quite 2016. “Hey don’t look so worried. Nothing ever happens here – does it G?” After 724 days Dar knows the lie of the land. Its truth is another matter.
Shalam’s gobby, flitty, flirty Dar (she has a boyfriend on base) contrasts with Virmani’s more intense, intellectually unquiet Gigi. Gigi’s rich father is a minister in a far-right religious – and ruling – party. Dar will have to wait at tables.
Shalam’s relentless talk then sudden switch-off with boyfriend news, is as compelling as Virmani’s brooding self-doubt and spontaneous decisions; buried under a carapace of class. Gigi’s been carefully taught but wants to break out in a white bikini.
The pair’s Godot-like boredom and games are funny like those of two people terminally bored with fag-ends of chat on repeat, if not each other. “I mean I respect you” intones Gigi. “What are you – the mafia?” Dar ripostes. Then there’s the Nutella.
They’re both appealing, individually and to each other. They plan for a world trip Dar can’t afford. Dar has a dream she’s going to be killed. Gigi has a secret she wants to tell. She tells us. Later, she has to decide on a far more deadly one, putting such things as sex in more shade than any desert umbrella.
Designer Michael Vale’s kept to Studio 2’s habitual sparseness. With Hunter you expect Complicité-like gestures. Here apart from minimal props like guns and that jar of Nutella, it’s spare to a fault. There’s a rusted corrugated sheet on coasters to reveal and disappear things, and a strip of earth only latterly mined. Ciaran Cunningham’s light beats relentlessly till the end when like the Kalahari desert, light blooms in a wild beating spectrum. Jack Baxter’s sound composition riffs on ‘Summertime’ and ‘Toothpaste Kisses’ but turns progressively eerie.
As the pair playfully fantasise about One Direction (poignantly with news just in) arriving naked and ready in the desert, it’s impossible not to warm to these two young women, handed an impossible world with their M4s, and told to enforce it. It has told on them, incrementally warped their identities and responses, though to different degrees.
Moving from the domestic and sexual taboos respectively in Buggy Baby (2018) and The Mikvah Project (2020), Azouz in Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia (2021) addresses relations between Jews and Arabs around a knitting-obsessed Nazi; and is increasingly political. Here he returns to a modest scale. This collaboration with Hunter and movement director Adi Gortler produces a hallucinatory field of energy, sprinkled with gestures in a minimal set.
The normally ebullient Dar receives two messages from her lover. The revelations darken everything. It’s bad luck that seven-months pregnant Zoz (Chipo Chung) and 16-year-old son Sim (Roman Asde, making a superb stage debut) arrive just then on a go-kart, which legally a 16-year-old can drive. There’s restrictions and Dar enforces them.
Sim is a huge car-tech fan. Gigi softens to let him have the email of her car-designing brother. There’s not only a slight Pozzo and Lucky quality of their arriving twice (though separately the second time); there’s an almost speculative fiction time-shift, though it’s meant to be the same day. It’s not teased out though.
But Dar is having none of it. Authority flows from one soldier to the other: sometimes one can order the other, and occasionally Officer Remo, a 22-year-old officer offstage (voiced by Chung) barks orders and reprimands as she speeds past. That though was a while back, and Dar repeatedly humiliates the newcomers, to Gigi’s discomfort. At one freakish moment, Sim is ordered to dance and Adi Gortler’s movement, so subtle and understated, here comes to an apex of frozen tiny gestures as Asde obeys in a minimal shuffle. It’s excruciating.
Both Chung and Asde return, and it’s Chung’s final moments with an explosive song involving foot-stamping that leave us in no doubt of the dispossession expressed by both characters.
After the other pair drive off the play itself skews. Tragedy is prepared for, to a degree unpredictable. Nevertheless there’s a slight raggedness about the later dramaturgy. Thematically it’s extremely powerful, just needs tightening. Actors are superb, though, resonances unmistakable. Compelling and unanswerable, it’s more humane than recent history in several parts of the world allow. Setting it in 2016, Azouz knows history itself has been overtaken. Highly recommended.
Gigi & Dar Written by Josh Azouz, Directed by Kathryn Hunter, Designer Michael Vale, Lighting Designer Ciaran Cunningham, Sound Designer/Composer Jack Baxter, Movement Director Adi Gortler, Production Manager Lewis Champney, DSM Kayleigh Anderson, ASM Ella Duffy.
