Dream Plays (Scenes from a Play I’ll Never Write): Clean

Sabrina Mahfouz
Traverse 2

One of the goals of this season was to commission playwrights during the Festival to write plays within a few days and Sabrina Mahfouz wasn’t even known to director Orla O’Loughlin at the beginning of August.

Where her longer play One Hour Only showed promise, Clean is sensational. The talent required to write a poetic mini-masterpiece in 48 hours is prodigious and we will hear a great deal more from Sabrina Mahfouz.

Her play is a reaction to the gender-bias of computer games. As a result, we meet a contrasting trio of would-be superheroines, Zainab, Chloe and Katya, respectively played by Rosie Wyatt, Nadia Clifford and Chloe Massey.

The first is a streetwise card cloner, the second a posh emerald smuggler and the last a Russian sex-supplier turned market manipulator.

The lack of trust between the three is obvious when they sit apart in a swanky club but the owner has other ideas.

Using blackmail and a little flattery, she brings them together for a Mission Impossible, with the prospect of saving the world some time soon.

This exhilarating half-hour comedy features what may well be the best writing on the Fringe—sadly, unless you were there, you have already missed it.

Reviewer: Philip Fisher

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