DOV AND ALI. To 5 July.

London.

DOV AND ALI
by Anna Ziegler.

Theatre 503 Latchmere Pub 503 Battersea Park Road SW11 3BW To 5 July 2008.
Tue-Sat 8pm Sun 5pm
Runs 1hr 15min No interval.

TICKETS: 020 7978 7040.
www.theatre503.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 29 June.

Irreconcilable ways of seeing the world.
Once upon a time, literary criticism seemed a safe pursuit. When scholars disagreed, nobody died as with a wrong cut by a surgeon, or a misconceived plan from a general in wartime. But nowadays there’s a war of ideology that’s rooted in outlooks on the world, and its literature. Including William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a novel in which freedom from social restraints lead to a battle between democracy and autocracy.

In an American High School, it becomes the tinderbox for the contrasting assumptions of Jewish teacher Dov and 17-year old student Ali, a Muslim from Pakistan. Religion matters to him much more than to Dov, with his non-Jewish partner Sonya.

Even more, though, there arises the social pattern of male family authority and the way it makes Ali look to his father as source of right. Never fully breaking from polite respect, Ali is driven to fury by what he sees as his teacher’s laziness and lax morality in being with Sonya.

Anna Ziegler’s play, unlike Golding’s novel, has a narrator, a voice existing also outside the action, in Ali’s sister Sameh. She’s performed with a fine concern and maturity by Kiran Landa, never resorting to self-pity as she describes how Sameh is a victim of Ali’s self-confident belief.

With his granite-set features and certainty in argument (not that Ali argues; he merely asserts forcefully) James Floyd portrays Ali’s mental pugnacity, as Ben Turner does the way this undermines the liberal assumptions on which Dov’s life and teaching are based.

While she expresses the problems with both an overstocking and a vacuum of bedrock principle, Ziegler inevitably seems closer to the liberal camp. Dov may be destroyed – though a final glimpse of him with Sonya suggests a sliver of hope. But so is Ali, who becomes separated from his sister.

For Ali, who adopts his father’s values unquestioningly, never reflects why he’d not want to live in Pakistan, from where his learned values emanate. It’s Sameh who tells the outcome of her male relatives’ strictness, something Landa conveys with composed restraint in this fascinating play of contrasting outlooks.

Ali: James Floyd.
Dov: Ben Turner.
Sameh: Kiran Landa.
Sonya: Orla Fitzgerald.

Director: Alex Sims.
Designer: Morgan Large.
Lighting: David Holmes.
Sound: Tom Hackley.
Voice coach: Julia Wilson-Dickson.
Fight director: Terry King.
Assistant director: Matthew Sedmak.

2008-07-01 08:53:23