Hadda And Hassan Leckliches!

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on HADDA AND HASSAN LEKLICHES! at Oran Mor, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 2.5.12.
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4 stars ****

WITH A WHOOSH of theatrical energy, a star is born, in this week’s Play, Pie and Pint show; or perhaps two stars, in a single lunchtime. Jaouad Essounani’s Hadda And Hassan Lekliches! – at the Traverse from next Tuesday – is a beautiful, raunchy, and terrifying picaresque adventure, in which our heroine Hadda, and her male alter-ego Hassan, chart their paths through the recent history of Morocco, from the 1970’s to the present day. Imagine a cross between Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the 1001 Nights, with the narrative double-tracked and given a dark 21st-century political twist, and you’ll begin to sense something of this show’s spectacular mix of earthiness and surrealism.

The tale it tells is unremittingly harsh; of poverty and casual sexual abuse in small-town Morocco, of political ferment, prosititution and oppression in booming North African cities, of unemployment, frustration, migration, new worlds glimpsed through the internet, and finally of the intensifying war on terror, and the deepening darkness it brings. Yet Essounani’s narrative explodes with life and humour; and Ben Harrison’s simple, inspired production moves unerringly through this complex landscape, using David Boyd’s percussion-based music to drive and punctuate the narrative, and revelling in Essounani’s astonishing linguistic playfulness, across the jostling worlds of English, Arabic, French and German

The show also features a fine, eloquent performance from El Razzougui as Hassan, and a show-stopping one from the dazzling young Lebanese actress Juliana Yazbeck as Hadda. There are some signs, after a thrilling 55 minutes, of Essounani’s having too many endings in mind, and offering three or four closing speeches, where one would do. For anyone who cares about the dangerous crossroads in global politics at which we find ourselves, though, this show is one that has to be seen; clever, vivid, and all the more disturbing for its fierce, funny humanity, that finally congeals into fury, and implacable hate.

ENDS ENDS