Out-of-towners test any Londoner worth their salt. Finding a show that strikes the balance between informative and enjoyable, engrossing but uplifting, light but also moving. It's tough.Rating
Excellent
A little background on this most specific house guest. My dear brother is a historian, eloquent, opinionated (must run in the family), and unrelenting in his delight or ire. To find a show that entertains this big old brain was a head-scratcher, thankfully Camden Fringe scattered a theatrical buffet under my toes. So, on a steaming Tuesday we moseyed up to the borough’s busiest vein as he leapt up the steps two at a time, and I followed dragging my heels nervously.
But nerves be damned, Antonia Chammas has written and performed a one-woman show of tightly spun dialogue, clear relationships, and philosophical aims. Trailing across Arabic, French, British and American. Reaching out from its setting in Lebanon to encompass geopolitics and international culpability.
All with very little physical help. Lauryn Jenkins’s direction does get quite the deluge out of our actress, but neglects any set apart from a rug, a 90s TV and three conference chairs. The curtains cladding the black box look dirty, and brother and I couldn’t work out if that was to show the grime of Beirut in 2020 or the laziness of the Etcetera Theatre in 2026. There is no lighting designer, so the very basic states are clumsily moved through, and Riwa Saab’s sound seems muffled throughout.
Yet we get Yara and Mina’s childhood picking pomegranates and playing in the mountains. We get so clearly the 2019 revolution and following tumultuous months and conversations between the sisters, culminating in the tragic events in August 2020.
This is down almost entirely to the barrelling energy and shards of characterisation by Chammas. With an oversized shirt and designer bag she differentiates the American-inflected, social-butterfly sister Mina (wanting to leave the homeland) from her older, more driven and ideological sister Yara (wanting to stay). A conversation between the two, repeated from both sides and looped back through memory, is a theatrical treat, showing us the flip sides of every interaction. Jokes ripen, fall, are snatched and then subsumed into the flow of words, not feeling uncomfortable but natural in Chammas’s darting tongue.
The toll of politics on people is heartbreaking, the needless waste of human life is soul-wrenching, if ever a show needed to migrate to a bigger and more enriched stage it is this one. If that’s not enough: “A percentage of ticket sales will go to Migrant Workers’ Action, an organisation that supports displaced migrant workers in Lebanon and fights to abolish the Kafala system.” Personal, political and altruistic, needless to say the relative was very much impressed.
Written by Antonia Chammas
Directed by Lauryn Jenkins
Associate Director: May Halm
Sound Design by Riwa Saab
Maybe Tomorrow has completed its run at Etcetera Theatre for Camden Fringe.
