A languidly sensuous Sumaya (Sara Sadeghi) in traditional costume, is apparently passing time by inspecting piles of documents scattered over the floor. The overall picture, with the set of soft geometrical shapes (a fissure symbolically dividing the large circle of the floor panel) looks like a typical Russell Flint watercolour depicting a North African hot afternoon. An impression of heat pervades. Behind a screen the shape of another woman, Marie, a French girl (Lou Broadbent) is in a state of agitation. The women seem to be in some kind of existential loop since the play, Sisyphus like, ends where it begins, with gunshots announcing the start.
Marie, the girlfriend of Meursault, a French Algerian, has been marked by society as the mistress of a murderer. Sumaya, with whom she now seems inextricably linked, is the mistress of a petty criminal and sister of the man, an unnamed Arab, who was shot by Meursault. The two women proceed to give what is more or less a rerun of the trial, which ended with a sentence of decapitation. They describe a world of petty crime, casual racism and misogyny as each, for their own reason, tries to make sense of past events.
The murder was apparently senseless; the only reason Meursault could give was (the debilitating effect of) ‘the sun’. Marie is at pains to give weight to the fact that the brother had a knife which he used to threaten Sumaya’s oafish and brutal lover. As a piece of theatre the main weakness is that most of the action is reported, the women narrating past events as parallel accounts of the same event with only occasional eruptions of anger as antagonists in the present to bring the piece alive.
Notwithstanding, the director, Fraser Corfield, has managed to coax a couple of excellent performances from intelligent readings of Emteaz Hussain’s dense and taut script. Lou Broadbent maintains a nervous intensity throughout with a tendency to allow the staccato rhythms of her French accent to feed into her physical action. It is a convincing portrait of a woman whose life has been tainted by events over which she had – and has – no control. Sara Sadeghi as the wronged party looking for some kind of justice for the multiple wrongs she rightly identifies, pitches her anger with care as she seeks recognition of her bruised pride and some kind of societal accountability.
Well done to Pilot Theatre for taking on a piece of ‘intellectual’ theatre and making a sound, thoughtful and stimulating production. There is nowhere near enough challenging theatre doing the rounds and kudos to The Tobacco Factory for seeking out the best of it. ★★★☆☆ Graham Wyles 26th November 2015
Image credit: Danielle Dorigo & Elvira Leone
