Gigi and Dar, Arcola Theatre review - a war-game of two halves

The writer-director Josh Azouz and actor-director Kathryn Hunter have collaborated on a piece exploring the ethics of being an army of occupation. Or, at least, I think that’s what Gigi and Dar is aiming for. 

The set gives little away about the whereabouts of the action – deliberately, I think. An unseen man's voice reads out the first stage directions, and we are left with an almost empty space where the fourth wall comes and goes, the actors direct remarks specifically at the audience and key characters “appear” only on walkie-talkies. 

We can see two folding chairs, with semi-automatics on them, plus a jaunty beach brolly overhead. Some of the exits and entrances take place behind a sliding corrugated iron screen. And there’s an army-style stencilled figure, 432, on the wall, denoting the number of the (unseen) roadblock two young female soldiers are in charge of. Their uniforms are the colour of bleached sand, but there are no references to their surroundings – is it a desert? In Israel? Somewhere else in the Middle East? When a local person eventually arrives at their roadblock, she appears to be from an African country.

Presumably we are in Occupied Territory, Anywhereland. As part of the occupying forces, the women are on the lookout for terrorist incursions, though their enemies aren’t name-checked. So uneventful are their duties that they have invented games to ward off boredom. One is the Time Game, where they bet on how many hours and minutes of their shift are left. Another is standard Truth or Dare, sometimes involving live grenades. At peak boredom, they hook themselves up to IVs, though what’s in the bags isn’t identified. They have six days left of their tour and can’t wait to be civilians again.

The first half of the piece focuses on the relationship between the two women, their badinage about sex in particular. Dar (Lola Shalam), 20, blonde, has a regular boyfriend, Naz; Gigi (Tanvi Virmani), 19, black hair, dark-eyed, has recently kissed a man nicknamed The Fridge because he is square, pale and cold. He is a good kisser, but he is the regular partner of their immediate superior, Officer Remo, who is present only as a barking voice, though at one point she seems to be there reprimanding the women for eating Nutella on duty, their panacea, for which they have to do press-ups. 

Of the two, Gigi is the more conventional. She was drafted and wants to stay out of trouble with her superiors so there is no danger of her tour being extended. Her father is a big cheese in the ruling ultra-right-wing party back home, so technically she’s rich. She is not as sexually adventurous as Dar, who is more down-to-earth, lippy and crude, but also very funny. Gigi calls her a “sass-bomb”. The two role-play themselves two years later, when Dar’s dream is that she will be a fashion designer with a side hustle at the UN. Her tone indicates she knows this is a mad fantasy but she says it anyway. 

The mood darkens when Gigi sends Dar off for something so she can be free to talk directly to the audience – where she tells us a secret that will unhinge Dar if she ever finds out about it, and one that Gigi feels intensely guilty about. Suddenly the possibility of trouble erupting between them seems real. Especially when Naz calls Dar to reveal some of what he had got up to the night before at the blockhouse, and she immediately becomes stony-faced and silent. Then a boy and his mother arrive on a homemade go-kart (we have previously seen the woman silently pushing a pram across the stage, in a glamorous dress and silver stilettos). 

What follows is a total shift in the piece’s tone, almost in its genre, as Dar is transformed into a cruel roadblock guard, overriding Gigi’s concern for the mother (Chipo Chung, pictured above right), who is heavily pregnant and bleeding. The woman’s affable curly-haired teenage son (Roman Asde, pictured below), connects with Gigi and secures from her an email contact at Hyundai, to further his car-making career. But Dar is remorseless and subjects the couple to a pointless ordeal, “to make our presence felt”. 

This humiliation will have serious repercussions for all four characters and sets in motion a chain of violent retribution. A side issue is that it will poison the women’s friendship irrevocably.

The two sides of the play work well within their parameters. Funny in a rather juvenile way, the women are a good comedy double act in the first half, the tedium of their duties amusingly mapped out, their exchanges rat-a-tat quickfire. They are callow and inexperienced, dreaming of having sex with equally young pop stars. In the edgy second half, they have to negotiate a different – real – world where there is no place for fantasy and finer feelings are suppressed. Here Dar falls back on the rules of her army training whereas Gigi shows an innate sympathy for the locals. But how do the two halves of the play connect? 

Are we really to see the violence the women set in motion as having its roots in one of them having a bad day with personal problems, for which the other feels guilty? Is this guilt a minor version of the shame both feel about their treatment of the mother and son? Is occupation itself a giant case of whole regimes acting in bad faith? The questoins niggle away without coming fully into he spotlight. And why the meta elements/? Are these intended to involve the audience in what happens onstage?

The acting is first-rate, and Hunter’s crisp and inventive direction gives the whole a nice snap and crackle; the final scene ends on a stunner of a line. But it is a game of two halves that don't quite gel, and doesn’t wholly earn its weighty payoff.

• Gigi and Dar at Arcola Theatre until 2 November
•  More theatre reviews on theartsdesk