Open the programme for this latest work in the Gate's fascinating season of new plays from abroad and you are assailed by narcissism.
There are five near-useless pages, vanity-listing previous work done by absolutely everyone involved with Sinan H Unel's Pera Palas. Yet there's not a word of contextualising information about the last 80 years of Turkey's political, religious and cultural history.
Such information would mightily help in comprehension and appreciation of the play's powerful lament for a Turkey holding out against western Europe's liberal, secularising and feminist tendencies.
Pera Palas, which deals with the oppression of Turkish women and the clash of values when near-east meets west, is organised within an ambitious theatrical structure, that the unhelpful programme inadequately explains. As if to emphasise Turkish resistance to change, Pera Palas's action moves between three time frames. In each period, English and American visitors are caught up in Turkish travails and love for individual Turks.
Es Devlin's magnificent, traverse-stage design evokes a suitable sense of claustrophobia by converting the auditorium into a Muslim dwelling. Battles in the sex and culture wars are waged as polygamous Turks and their submissive women face critical outsiders. Attitudes on both sides are unflinching. The Turkish girl whom Evelyn, a radical journalist, vainly tries to save from an arranged marriage in 1918 succumbs to a loveless and abusive existence. Kathy, the under-characterised American who falls for Orhan and marries him, suffers the rigours of assimilation. When her son Murat arrives in 1994 with his male American lover, he seems the victim of a very cross-cultural marriage.
Sacha Wares's vehement, comically slanted production reaches a tremendous climax of recriminatory anguish and accusation. Pera Palas may be reiterative and its political pointing cursory. But the impassioned performances, particularly those of Kevork Malikyan and Jonathan Weir, stamp this eye-opening play with rare outbursts of theatrical excitement.
The Orient Express Festival: Pera Palas
