Written and directed by Ché Walker, this play brings a touch of unexpected glamour to a tiny Earl’s Court theatre. It is set in Los Angeles where it was originally performed, stars Girl from the North Country’s Sheila Atim – who also composed the atmospheric score – and makes extensive use of video and dance. Yet, for all its high production values, I found it as puzzlingly enigmatic as its bilingual title suggests.
The plot is as convoluted as The Big Sleep, and there are times when Walker’s dialogue seems to be paying direct homage to Chandler: at one point Atim as a sophisticated lapdancer called Rosa laconically tells a cop: “You know your way round a woman and you have good hygiene.” The essential story, however, is one of betrayal. Blaz, a petty hood in the barrio, takes the rap for a hold-up when his partner-in-crime, Karl, flees the scene.
While Blaz is doing three years in jail, his lover, Havana, has a fling with the detective who has put him behind bars. On emerging from the slammer, Blaz instinctively seeks revenge on those who have done him wrong.
Walker has been quoted as saying he was inspired by the idea of “what if Desdemona was actually cheating” and the echoes of Othello are loud and insistent. Karl becomes an Iago-like plotter besotted by Blaz and informing him, “I know you longer than your woman know you.” Atim, who played Emilia last year in Othello at Shakespeare’s Globe, here fulfils a faintly similar role in that she acts as Havana’s counsellor when she is accused of infidelity. In addition to Shakespeare, the piece is also studded with references to films and plays ranging from Nosferatu to Mrs Warren’s Profession.
But I found myself constantly wondering what Walker was driving at. Is he suggesting, like Bacon, that there is a “wild justice” in revenge, that love is inseparable from treachery or that Los Angeles is the last refuge of the lonely? All those ideas surface but none of them is strong enough to hold the story together.
What we get is the theatrical equivalent of film noir. Atim’s music has a nerve-jangling quality. The sex, especially between Havana and the cop, is upfront and is represented both by cinematic coupling and choreographed movement. The threat of violence is also ever-present. The cast, most of whom switch between English and Spanish, perform with great precision. Atim is always hypnotic as a denizen of smoky nightclubs searching for romantic love. Gabriel Akuwudike invests Blaz with a baffled menace, Jessica Ledon hints that Havana, however unfaithful, is good at heart, and Benjamin Cawley leaves us in no doubt that the conniving Karl is in love with Blaz whom he incites to violence.
The strangest role, however, is that of a sex worker named Serena who acts as a chorus. Played with dash and spirit by Sasha Frost, she is given to recurring dreams about pterodactyls flying over Los Angeles, which seems a rather desperate attempt by Walker to lend mystery to a city that was once said to have “the personality of a paper cup”. Like much else in Walker’s baroque play, it doesn’t really add up, yet I found myself succumbing to the filmic verve of his production.
At the Finborough, London, until 26 January.
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