There is no inoculation against the infectious fun of SAMI IN PARADISE. You succumb to the delirium drummed up by director Eamon Flack and his contagious company immediately.
The conceit of inmates staging Nikolia Erdman’s early Soviet era satire, The Suicide, in a refugee camp is an inspired choice and makes SAMI IN PARADISE an epic entertainment of epidemic proportion.
Adapted by Eamon Flack and The Company, SAMI IN PARADISE is a colossal, chaotic, anarchic carnival, a sprawling satire, a fabulous farce.
The cast and director abseil the heights of absurdity in a world where suicide gives one a reason to live and others an opportunity to profit.
During the making of the play, Flack and his cast researched the myriad refugee camps that exist in our war and climate ravaged world and discovered quotations, people and events that bore uncanny similarities with lines, characters and situations in The Suicide.
So a play about Stalinist Russia is subsumed and transformed into a play about life in refugee camps.
The set is beyond Brechtian, with props and costumes scrounged and rudimentary lighting, improvised at times when the portable power generator goes kaput.
A blanket hung on a clothes line serves as a wall and a follow spot from the footlights creates mood and atmosphere. It is the verisimilitude of the conceit, one of the simple and sublime nuances built into the show.
The cast is superlative.
As Sami, Yalin Ozucelic could very well be Semyon, the pitiful protagonist of Erdman’s play. Unkempt, bedraggled, a procrastinator par excellence, Ozucelik gives side splitting slapstick to the sloven, from his bedsheet tug of war with his wife, Maria, to his contretemps with his mother in law, his inept attempt at learning the tuba and his seduction by committee to self extinguish.
Victoria Haralabidou beautifully plays Maria, stoic, solid and supportive wife of Sami. Bemused and bewildered, her presence is constantly bewitching. Bewitching too and utterly beguiling, is Paula Arundell as her mother. Arundell doubles, at times in pretty quick turnaround, and, at every move, is incomparable in vocal and physical timing.
Charlie Garber plays Charlie Gerber, a South African CEO of an NGO in a WTF characterisation of genteel grotesqueness, a dealer in digital media manipulation who means to manufacture martyrdom for his own benefit and cause. It’s one of the showiest parts – and that’s saying something in this showcase of accomplished showoffs – and he gives a spectacular performance.
Indeed, peerless performances abound in this robust, rollicking and irreverent carnival, from Fayssal Bazzi, Nancy Denis,, Marta Kaczmarek, Mandela Mathia, Arky Michael, Hazem Shammas and Vaishnavi Suryaprakash.
The performers are accompanied on stage by two musicians, Hamed Sadeghi on strings and Mahan Ghobadi on percussion which adds timbre and texture to this elixir of joy.
Eamon Flack’s direction is an object lesson in the organisation of nuanced chaos and the comedy of compassion and community. His concern is not to canonise or demonise refugees but to acknowledge them as people – petty, silly, ridiculous, joyous, human.
SAMI IN PARADISE continues until 29th April.