Damascus

Synopsis

Welcome to Damascus. The oldest continuously inhabited city on earth, a jewel of the Arab world and the crossroads of the Middle East. Paul is here to sell English language textbooks. It’s Valentine’s Day and he’d rather be at home with his wife. Paul begins negotiations with his Syrian contact, Muna. Can he seal the deal? At first, misunderstandings multiply - then, their presumptions about one another fall away and new possibilities emerge. Meanwhile Zacharia, the hotel porter, fervently hopes that Paul has brought some Scottish girls with him and all the while, in the background, Elena, the Ukrainian cocktail pianist, tinkles away... In Damascus, a city of transformations, Paul grapples with language and love, meanings and misconceptions. And as his flight home is delayed by a bomb at Beirut Airport, he begins to wonder - will he ever leave?

Our Review:

10 February 2009

Sometimes you fall in love with a play, and like love, not always for the most logical of reasons. David Greig’s Damascus is a house and place of dreams. I remember a night, very similar to the one Greig describes, in Tehran, before the revolution, when the night sky too was very blue (though we couldn’t see snow on the mountain tips as Greig describes in his Damascus) but we danced rock n’roll on the dance floor in a western style night club at odds with the world beyond the twirling whiz ball, with its ladies in chadors and sewage running in the street. Western embassies were sited north of the main street and of course, had running water.

Something of that contradiction and allure is caught by Greig in a play which, like Anne Washburn’s The Internationalist (seen last year at the Gate) attempts to come to grips with cultural relativism, westerners travelling in foreign lands, lost in translation misunde...

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Latest User Review

Lily Tipni - 15 February 2009:

This is a VERY intelligently written, warm and compassionate play, astutely performed by an excellent cast. It made me laugh but more importantly it made me think - how hard it is in the world for the truest stories to come into being - or are we all constructing fantasies - like Zak the waiter and his Hollywood dreams, Wasim the Dean and his poetic desire, Paul and his idealised pc version of Britain. Interestingly it was the women - the translator and the pianist who were the most potentially subversive but still had to play (or speak) other people's words or music. Very, very good and very topical....

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