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The Review - THEATRE by REBECCA FIELDING
Published: 1 May 2008

Strangers on a stage

STRANGERS
Hackney Empire

?IF it’s not the destination but the journey that counts, Ninaz Khodaiji’s Strangers is the equivalent of a departure lounge.
Five characters take us on five journeys in a mix of disjointed prose, verse, telephone conversations, emails and broken dialogues.
A young woman (Liane-Rose Bunce) travels the Amazon seeking the secrets of south America but encounters instead the frustrations of language barriers and tour guides.
Joanna Nuttall is a wistful American scholar who navigates a competitive marriage and the frustration of a second- rate teaching career.
Ingrid (delightfully played by Sarah Borges) is trapped between the longing for a child and the compulsive need to return to the remoteness of a long distance love affair.
Devlin (David Farnworth), a rat-race New Yorker, negotiates his marriage like a business deal, and a disgruntled Serbian Boy (Michael Chalkley) welcomes the audience with questions about where we live and what we do in an attempt to reinforce the fact we are all “strangers”.
Khodaiji suspends the conventions of theatre with a brave script, letting the fragments of everyday life wash over us and asking us questions rather than offering answers.
Audience participation is required on two levels: inconsequential banter with the actors about our own lives, together with having to “fill in the blanks” ourselves if we want to find anything more than the poetic in this two hour performance.
Simon Duff’s sound design offers a necessary rhythm to the play – sensitively enhancing the connection between the writing and the performances.
Repeated references to 9/11 as an allegory for the fallibility of the human condition is overstated and in the hands of less skilled actors could grate.
We face a dilemma as we sit before Khodaiji’s five strangers: do we suspend our desire to be moved and entertained by what we pay to see or should we embrace the anti-climax of “almost-monologues and nearly-dialogues” and accept we are on a journey which really goes nowhere?
Until May 17
020 8985 2424

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