Up the Junction

Claire Allfree|Metro10 April 2012

Modern-day Babels are easy to find in our multicultural city, with no more typical example than Dalston: home to a veritable cacophony of languages.

It is this that is the inspiration for Babel Junction, which weaves five contemporary stories by different writers about life in that part of London into one pleasingly fraying tapestry.

Evelyn, a devout black nurse, has been driven to madness by grief for her stillborn child.

Fez, a young Muslim wide-boy, is planning to move in with his Jewish girlfriend despite also falling for the radical Islamic views of his best friend. Both are testing the limits of their wish to make their own choices.

A Hawaiian taxidermist, who lives with his invalid mother, has a fetish for wigs. And the Turk in the kebab shop has a secret: the daughter whom he has never seen.

Most of these stories are about the struggle for faith in a city that is as full of demons as it is angels.

Yet director Suzanne Gorman cleverly picks out a stronger thread linking her disparate narratives together: each character is in some way trying to recreate a family that they have either lost or never known.

Still, Gorman needs to get a much stronger grip on material that often juxtaposes realism with the fantastical and whose ambitious structure doesn't allow much room for its characters to breathe.

Strong performances from Maureen Hibbert as Evelyn and Richard Sumitro as a particularly persuasive Fez help a play that has the bare bones of something good, but not yet the flesh.

Babel Junction

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