Dirt

AUSTRIAN playwright Robert Schneider’s unsettling but ultimately disappointing exploration of the life of an Iraqi immigrant is the most performed one-person play in the German speaking world of the past decade, according to the Guardian’s preview last weekend.

Taking the form of a poetic, sometimes frenzied speech lasting just over an hour, it was most likely intended as a kind of grim, scathing satire.

The man delivering the speech is Sad (Christopher Domig), a rose seller originally from Basra. It’s not clear, as it happens, whether Sad is this gentleman’s name, as he keeps telling us he is a liar – but one thing is clear: in trying to assimilate to his host country, he has become a fervent professor of its prejudices, to the extent that he has come to see himself as the outside world sees him: as dirt.

Now, relatively few liberal middle class inner-Londoners – the kind of people who (I suppose) watch plays at the Arcola – think of foreigners in this way. In fact, in a place like Hackney, there are so many foreigners that one rarely even thinks in terms of ‘foreign’ and ‘not foreign’.

While Schneider’s trick might have worked in Austria, where racism is probably more common, it falls somewhat flat over here – and all the more so in a place as multicultural and liberal as Dalston.

And things becomes even more ridiculous when Sad starts talking about being assaulted by thugs who stick glass in his face and want to cut off his penis.

It’s not all bad, however. There are some humorous and charming moments, and Domig gives an excellently chilling performance. But this does not compensate for the unfortunate pitch of the whole affair and the redundant nature, to the people of east London, of this play’s veiled anti-racist message.