Alongside all the promotional ads promising a Gulf paradise, there have been a number of newspaper articles about the dark side of Dubai. This new play by the British-Lebanese playwright Carmen Nasr leans to the latter view and makes its points in a crisply watchable manner. Its arguments would have even more force, however, if it followed the old dramatic rule of giving the devil his due.
Nasr focuses on the polarised experiences of different immigrants in Dubai. On the one hand, there are the exploited construction workers, typified by the south Asian Amar who sends home lyrical letters about staring at the stars but who eventually finds himself in the gutter. On the other hand, there are the bumptious Brits busy promoting Dubai’s high-rising properties. One such, Jamie, is a construction company PR who unwittingly, and a touch witlessly, finds himself feeding compromising information to a visiting journalist friend, Clara, who is out to do a knocking piece.
It’s a good setup and, through Clara, the play nails some of the hard truths about Dubai. We hear of the way guest workers’ passports are confiscated, the often foul living conditions, the brutal suppression of protest. I was surprised Nasr made no mention of the notorious story of a visiting fashion journalist who, in 2013, reported a rape to the police and found herself facing a 16-month prison sentence. But, although Nasr tries to put the case for Dubai, it never carries much weight. At one point, Clara is confronted by a colleague of Jamie’s who argues that immigrant workers earn more than they would at home and that the UK’s reliance on cheap labour disqualifies it from taking the moral high ground. Since the guy has already been shown to be a gold-plated shit, his arguments quickly evaporate.
Nasr cleverly links the stories of the high-living expats and the foreign underclass by suggesting betrayal is common to both. She also provides a graphic picture of life in Dubai as Jamie tells Clara of weekend binges on a palm island hotel with the biggest aquarium-tunnel in the world filled with sharks, squid and baby seahorses. But, while the scene provides bags of information about Dubai’s detachment from reality, it also leaves you wondering what the hard-headed Clara could ever have had in common with an impressionable publicist.
Georgie Staight directs with brisk economy, Bex Kemp’s design makes ingenious use of a set of transparent cubes, and the acting is good. Adi Chugh as the head-in-the-clouds Amar, Varun Sharma as a variety of foreign workers, Miztli Rose Neville as the commonsensical Clara and Nicholas Banks as the chump-like Jamie are all perfectly plausible. But, while Nasr’s play heightens our awareness of Dubai as a sterile Shangri-La, it would be even better if it made its advocates something more than a set of shiny-suited puff-merchants.
- At the Finborough, London, until 21 February. Box office: 0844-847 1652.
- This article was amended on 16 February 2017. An earlier version said incorrectly that the woman in the 2013 rape case was a fashion journalist.
