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Gregg Chillin in Invasion |
Novelist’s debut production is brought to book
INVASION
Soho Theatre
THE debut play by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, owes a huge debt to Martin Crimp’s postmodern treatise on the self, Attempts On Her Life.
Both plays reject traditional use of structure, narrative and character, assembling a jigsaw of tangentially related sketches. It’s a big gamble: plot and character are time-honoured methods of keeping the audience interested. Remove them entirely, and the odds are against you. It paid off for Mr Crimp, just about.
Mr Khemiri’s effort is less successful. Where Mr Crimp brought a carnival-esque exuberance and variety to his subject, Mr Khemiri, a novelist by profession, struggles to inject imagination or theatrical flair. The result is a repetitive and fundamentally undramatic meditation on an issue that deserves better treatment.
That issue is the shifting network of contradictory illusions that constitute Muslim identity, which Mr Khemiri embodies in the protean figure of Abulkasem.
In the first scene, Abulkasem is a piece of all-purpose slang used by two youths to chat up a Kurdish student. In another, the same student imagines Abulkasem as a radical feminist theatre director who rebuts the cultural assumptions of her classmates. In the next sequence, a panel of intellectuals dispute the identity of an elusive, politically ambiguous terrorist, also called Abulkasem. And so on.
One or two moments do stand out, such as when an interpreter translates an asylum seeker’s innocent renditions of Abba as a fanatical hate-rant. But most scenes are suffocated by their predictability, as well as the author’s heavy dramatic touch: having lengthy exposition chopped in with bits of dialogue works in novels, not plays.
Despite the individual talent of the cast, they cannot vivify a wilfully alienating tract that belongs in an anthology of essays, not on stage.
Until March 28
020 7478 0100 |
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