4 STARS. Henry Naylor’s new play, the Angel of Kobane, exemplifies the view that theatre should be a means of understanding the world beyond the news headlines
Each part of Henry Naylor's Arabian Nightmares trilogy, endeavours to make sense of the West’s perpetual war in the Middle East during the 21st Century by focusing on the fate of individual lives.
Here is Rehana, a 19-year old law student, who became an overnight social media legend in 2014, as a lethal Kurdish sniper, supposedly with a hundred kills, especially feared by ISIS since they believe that death by a female bars a martyr’s entry to the virgin pleasures of paradise.
Almost nothing is known of the real person, if she even existed, but Naylor has embodied the few bones of fact about “Rehana” plausibly characterising her as a young woman trained from childhood by her father to protect their farm of pistachio trees. When she is twelve he orders her to kill the family dog, Bizou, injured by a jackal. He then insists on daily training her with a rifle declaring: “Humans are animals. And as an animal you have only one decision to make… Are you prey or are you predator?”
No sooner has she entered college than Kobani is attacked. Naylor explained to me afterwards that the siege will be regarded as one of the most important events of the century with liberal civilisation at stake. Her father joins the YPG but instead of fleeing with her mother to Turkey Rehana ventures to find him leading her into the Kurdish women’s army.
Steve Ullathorne
Everything is refracted through Rehana’s memory. This is a one-woman play in which the character tells her life-story through a succession of vivid recollected moments, alternately humorous, tragic, absurd, horrific, exciting, poignant, all infused with the dangerous immediacy of war. As Rehana is the only character on stage an exceptional intensity develops between audience and performer.
The minimalist mise-en-scene, largely attributed to Naylor’s collaborator, director Michael Cabot, amplifies the intimacy of the Arcola’s space. There is only the bare brick of the back wall, a large wooden barrel, and fine sand scattered on the floor occasionally hazing like the hot desert air.
Clearly, most depends on the actor bearing the entire weight of the drama. Only a bravura performance will do. Fortunately, Avital Lvova delivers, whispering, screaming, chatting, laughing, babbling, crying real tears. Last night, as the play progressed the disparate audience of strangers knitted together into a community of witnesses. At the end, remarkably, they rose as one to give a standing ovation.
The significant complexities of the political context stay largely obscure revealed essentially as the passion and pain of Rehana personifying them, though there are moments of explicit reflection: I should have bequeathed you a land fit for your law, her father says after she finds him. Justice must be seized, he commands. “It’s the dread paradox. That to create a land free from tyranny, we must be as bloody as the tyrants themselves.”
Overall, the play’s originality is striking, and the force of Lvova’s performance extraordinary.
- Showing until October 7 (Not Sundays) arcolathetre.com; Box office: 020 7503 1646
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