Gigi & Dar

What happens if you give kids in conflict zones guns? That’s the thrust of this new play by Josh Azouz, whose work has often blended horror and humour, using strange and sometimes surreal settings to tune into the politics of race, religion and human relationships.

His last play, Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied Tunisia, explored Jewish-Arab relations via a knitting Nazi. This latest – a self-aware comedy first about keeping secrets as a teenager, then about keeping secrets as a soldier – has the same impulse, essentially an anti-war message through off-kilter comedy, but it’s less specific in its target.

Gigi (Tanvi Virmani) and Dar (Lola Shalam) are two young soldiers guarding a roadblock, somewhere. The lighting suggests it’s hot and sandy. Current events make comparisons to the Middle East inevitable, though the lack of place names means you can map any conflict zone onto the bare stage. In this strange, non-specific landscape they talk – often directly to the audience, seemingly aware they’re in a play – about how they’re a few days from the end of compulsory service. They eat Nutella and chat about boyfriends, secrets (who’s sleeping with who), their different backgrounds (Gigi is rich, Dar is left-wing). They fiddle with their massive machine guns. Virmani and Shalam bring the goofy dialogue to life brilliantly, Shalam’s Dar the more garrulous and mercurial, while Virmani is quiet and intense.

Despite the occasional mention of ‘enemies’, ‘extremists’, ‘your people’, these opening scenes are pure comedy, quite physical, almost clowning, the sphere of expertise of director and general legend Kathryn Hunter. As Hunter brings brilliant performances out of those two actors, we watch a giddy back and forth of games and streams of consciousness, those strange dregs of chat you reach when you’ve spent too much time with someone. It’s a bit Becketty – two characters waiting around – and a bit Pintery in the humour it finds in a black situation. And it’s pretty great.

But there’s a sequence where that humour dribbles away. A pregnant woman and her son come to the roadblock. Suddenly these young women who were talking about boys have to pretend to be adults. Azouz applies the same moral problem of ‘should I tell the truth or should I keep it a secret’ to a much more serious issue than boyfriends – the kind of thing that happens when 20-year-olds are put in charge of lethal weapons.

What starts as comedy turns to desolation as the distance lengthens between the lives Gigi and Dar have imagined for themselves and the ones they’ve got. It’s a serious shift in tone, and Hunter handles scenes of suspense and cruelty and sadness just as well as the comic ones, as do Shalam and Virmani. But the more serious the play becomes, the less it works. The weirdness and uniqueness of Azouz’s voice fades, as does the complexity of his themes, reducing down to something strangely simplistic. Basically, it's a play of two halves, and the first half is better.