PERA PALAS
Arcola Theatre, London E8
Opened 15 June, 2007
***
The second and final production in the Arcola's "Orient Express"
mini-season, which pays acknowledgement to the Turkish origins of much
of the surrounding district's population (and of the venue's management
team), takes the title literally. The Pera Palas hotel in Istanbul was
the preferred destination of many travellers on the Orient Express
railway.
Sinan H. Ünel's play looks at residents of the same hotel room in
three successive generations: a Turkophile English woman visiting at
the end of the First World War (and the birth of modern secular
Turkey), an American teacher in the 1950s and a gay couple a few years
before the play's composition in 2000. Particular characters link the
eras: a maid in the harem visited by Evelyn Crawley in 1918 becomes the
mother of the man who marries teacher Kathy in 1953, and this couple in
turn become the parents of Murat who returns home with his American
lover in 1994.
But the play's chronology is not linear: scenes are intercut, and
figures from two or even all three periods may coincide on the central
stage area of the hotel room. Moreover, the cast of ten play more than
twice as many roles, sometimes even switching gender. George Tardios,
in particular, has a couple of semi-comic drag roles in earlier periods
as well as turning in a mighty principal performance as the older
father, Orhan, in 1994 scenes.
Director Michael Cabot and designer Jeremy Daker make full use of the
Arcola's flexible, unconventional space, as buds of action blossom off
the central area. On entering, we see the cast making their
preparations in the same space, and one bank of the audience reclines
on rugs and cushions. Ünel's play, whilst admirably ambitious, is
in the end similarly diffuse. The keynote is understanding of differing
viewpoints: not in the timid cultural-relativist sense, but the kind
that demands effort and application. (Orhan, an ageing conservative by
the 1990s, is lamenting the "old" values of secularism and democracy as
Turkish Islamism begins to grow.) Beyond a general air of exhortation,
though, there is little sense of passionate authorial drive. Still, the
characters make for more than agreeable company for two and a half
hours.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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