Damascus

Paul (Paul Higgins) enters the lobby of a Damascus hotel; he's in the city to sell the English language teaching materials he's written to a prestigious local college.

Zakaria (Khalid Laith), the hotel porter befriends him in the hope of meeting Scottish girls. Paul meets Muna (Nathalie Armin) and Wasim (Alex Elliot), and the cultural, historical and emotional confusions and complications ensue.

So, essentially a comedy of misunderstandings and potential disillusionments - except that it's set in Damascus, the place Saul the Jew was on his way to when he apparently had a vision which changed the focus of Christianity and the future history of large parts of the world. The city whose Caliphate rivaled that of Baghdad, and whose population was for many centuries Muslim, Christian and Jewish and which tolerated all three. A centre, as Wasim points out, of Islamic culture.

Now a wide-screen television dominates the hotel lobby, and Elena (Dolya Gavanski), the foyer pianist, is reduced to playing Rachmaninov backward to an unappreciative clientele of Muslim matrons taking tea with their friends. Safety and survival are the upmost concerns for Wasim especially, as the multi-cultural assumptions of Paul's text-books are torn apart to accommodate contemporary Syrian sensibilities.

There are some fine comedic moments here, as the cultural presumptions of east and west are paraded in their own versions of the emperor's clothes. Although he fails to sell his English language course, Paul's departure is delayed by 'the situation', and unable to get home in time for Valentine's Day with his wife, he finds himself featuring in the hopes of Zakariah, who dreams of selling his autobiographical film-script to Hollywood and meeting lots of exotic (i.e. foreign) women.

Like Paul, this reviewer couldn't help feeling that somehow things had not quite worked out as expected. However seemingly pleasant the hotel and the people encountered appear; rather like the imitation fountain of the hotel's foyer, one wondered why certain things were where they were while the suggestion of other elements led to expectations unfulfilled.

Elena's biting satires on her tone-deaf audiences hide her essentially choric role; her opening speech leads us to expect a darker, deeper tale than the one which unfolds, and to speculate on what that might be (and may be again?). This is a pity, as a great deal of hard work has clearly gone into the creation of 'Damascus', but it ultimately fails to fully satisfy.

Times: 5-26 August (not Mondays) , time varies (see Fringe and Traverse programmes for details)

Copyright Bill Dunlop 2007. Published on EdinburghGuide.com 2007