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IRISH INDEPENDENT
Monday 1 October 2007
Review by Colin Murphy
SLICING THE EDGES OFF TOPICAL SLAB OF MEAT
Two young Romanians sit on a flight from Dublin. He is going to do a MA in Dublin. She is moving to live with her “Irish” boyfriend, Voicu. “He’s got a Romaninan name,” observes her fellow traveller. “Yeh, but he’s actually been Irish for over a year,” she replies.
This is an intriguing play about Romanians in Ireland by a young Romanian writer, Gianina Carbunaria. It was a hit in Romania and comes to Dublin in an English-language version as a co-production between the theatre festival and London’s Royal Court Theatre.
Plays about multiculturalism and integration have a certain vogue at the moment. The striking success of ‘Kebab’ is that it broaches these issues without any of the usual cant about multiculti bonhomie, or exploitation and victimisation, or ‘hardworking’ immigrants. This is not an ‘issues’ play. Instead this Romanian plays echoes Irish emigrant plays, such as ‘Kings of the Kilburn High Road’ and ‘The Walworth Farce’, in giving us a story of emigrants whose life choices have left them alienated, but who remain responsible for those choices themselves, without blaming the “host”society.
Plot
Carbunaria’s story presents us with three young Romanians caught up in the Dublin underbelly of sex, work and pornography.
The plot has an edge and a voice that is fresh and distinctive.
Its observations on Romanian life in Dublin hum with integrity. It is directed with pace by a young Irish director Orla O’Loughlin, and acted with verve by an English cast.
Amidst all the debate about the “new Irish” and how to accommodate them, this is a new “Irish” play that asks for no concessions, and takes no quarter.
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