Pipeline Productions presents The Collector

By Helena Payne

For a man used to providing barrels of laughs, The Collector marks a drastic change in direction for writer producer, co-director Henry Naylor. For an individual more often associated with satirical comedies such as Spitting Image and Parsons and Naylor’s Pull-Out Section, the decision to write a play centred on the Iraq War and the images of torture that surfaced from the military prisons operated by the occupying forces is brave. The Collector is a noble effort to bring something human and relatable to a conflict whose repercussions still sting every day. Henry Naylor has crafted a beautiful story pulled from the mangled wreckage of this miserable human catastrophe, yet I left the theatre harrowed and uncomfortable.

Tucked away in Studio 2 at The Arcola, the stage is bold and stark. Three metal stools break the space under three withered light-bulbs hanging in their naked state. With a nod to classical theatre, the piece begins with a prologue setting the scene and addressing the West’s Orientalist attitudes towards the Middle East. In peculiar rhyming couplets, we are invited to redress our opinions of the land of “genies” and “flying carpets.” I was wrong-footed with this strange beginning, so at odds with the Dalston exposed brick and the actors in their smart blacks. Iraq, we are told, is where writing was conceived and devised, where the Garden of Eden was situated and where poetry was first expressed. It must be intentional that Naylor has chosen to present his play through the most poetic of mediums - story-telling.

Our story revolves around the character of Nassir, a young, hopeful, pro-Western translator who begins working for the Americans as an interrogator in Mazrat Gaol. The three actors reflect this literally in the staging by revolving around a conspicuous space centre stage. They are his equally optimistic fiancé who shares his love of hip hop and rap music, his close colleague, Foster the interrogator and the head of the prison Captain Kasprowicz. To start with the characters toss each other memories of Nassir, painting a beautifully audacious portrait of a man who believed the rhetoric and wanted to help his country. Their interconnecting stories weave gracefully together, fleshing out Nassir’s image but the dialogue they have with themselves is just odd. A great deal of groundwork unites their individual portrayals of Nassir, so much so that I could see him clearly, but it was plain weird when they mimicked his voice and put on an accent to recount conversations.

During an interrogation, Nassir is confronted by a psychotic prisoner who threatens his life outside the prison. With his family and fiancé now living under surveillance and in great danger, the different characters perceptions of Nassir and on what they believe is going on begin to peel away from each other. We experience his fury and disappointment at the Americans who exploit his expertise but fail to help him throwing bureaucracy back at his desperate pleas for help. They all agree Nassir ends up resembling the criminals he was working against, living in a cell for safety, “eating the same muck,” becoming bitter and despondent.

The Collector effectively illustrates how the friction between the Middle East and the West is an ideological one. Naylor highlights and specifically focuses on women’s bodies as the battleground, the territory that is being fought over. At the beginning of the play Nassir buys his fiancé Western style clothing; jeans, hoodies as a gesture that she is part of a modern Iraqi future. As the play unwinds, we learn that Nassir concedes to terror tactics and makes a pact with the prisoner to take Zoya into his home under protection. Ritu Arya is heart-breaking as she rails for the thousands of women who will not be heard, flaming; “Is this what we fought for? So I could live in someone else’s house cleaning and cooking?” The theme is returned to in the anecdote Captain Kasprowicz recounts about a female suicide bomber who seduces a GI before detonating her explosives in his embrace. Equally, it is the murder of Foster that prompts Captain Kasprowicz into the rage that ultimately seals Nassir’s fate. Her body was the sacrifice Nassir makes for the safety of his fiance’s body; the assault on Foster’s body provokes his own demise.

The actors all perform with brutal energy and emotional clarity, directing every word to the audience. However, it sometimes felt a little fragmented and frustrating as they lived and died in their own kinespheres, never interacting with each other. Perhaps this was a comment on the loneliness and mistrust that thrives in a war zone, but I found it quite limiting. The play ends with a prologue that unpicks the charm woven by their stories and suggests that “man’s greatest enemy is our own brutality.” We are reminded this is just an example of a story among thousands that will never be given the time and space of an Arcola stage and the rather gloomy suggestion that history will continue to repeat itself. Like Iraq itself, this play is unstable, the stories sometimes interlock awkwardly but it is the elegant and sensitive characterisations that tie it all together. It is the characterisations of the people Cabot and Naylor have chosen that save this play from being gauche; in much the same way, I suspect it must be the people of Iraq themselves who need to save it, rather than the alien constructs forced upon them.

Pipeline Productions

presents

THE COLLECTOR by Henry Naylor

Directed by Henry Naylor & Michael Cabot

@postscriptjour

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