Josh Azouz describes being in a Jerusalem bus station as a teenager and seeing a young woman lazily carrying a machine gun as she applied eyeliner. The image stuck with him and in part prompted his play Gigi and Dar in which two uniformed young women with machine guns are guarding a roadblock in the middle of nowhere.
Early in its development phase, the show was set in Israel, but perhaps in sensitivity to the current war has shifted to an unidentified location somewhere in the world.
The earlier, longer section resembles an extended tight comic sketch in which almost everything the two women say gets a laugh. Bored, they spend their time swapping stories about who got off with whom, playing games such as Truth and Dare, counting the time they have left doing national service, singing the odd song and eating Nutella. Dar (Lola Shalam) throws into the mix a dream about being shot by someone driving a go-kart, which reflects something of the tension they must feel in their job.
Occasionally, they address the audience directly, telling us something about each other. Dar points out disapprovingly that Gigi’s dad is a minister of the far-right government. When she later tells Gigi (Tanvi Virmani) what she would like to do to them, Gigi nervously asks if she would shoot her dad. Dar says no because she rather likes his dimples.
We also hear a bit about their sex lives. Dar speaks about her partner Naz, saying if he ever betrayed her with another woman, then she would castrate him and shoot the woman. That worries Gigi, who tells the audience she had a sexual encounter with Naz the night before. She becomes even more worried when Naz phones Dar to admit he had sex with someone.
The shorter second section of the show takes a surreal shift into improbable tragedy. A go-kart driven by sixteen-year-old Sim (Roman Asde) arrives at the roadblock carrying his pregnant mother, Zoz (Chipo Chung), who needs urgent hospital treatment. Gigi is relaxed enough to swap e-mail addresses with the lad, but Dar takes a more brutal line, ordering him to strip and then sing and dance. The humiliation leaves him shaking. More complications follow.
The actors, directed superbly by Kathryn Hunter, brilliantly deliver lines and visual expressions to get laughter or concerned expressions from the audience. Almost every line in the first section had most of the press night audience laughing.
Josh Azouz has written a light first section that is certainly as entertaining as a typical contrived sketch show can be. Unfortunately, there is nothing beyond the jokes, which are fun to watch as long as you don’t expect them to lead to anything serious.
The less entertaining second-half visit to serious issues can be crude, for example, the heavy suggestion that the soldier Dar humiliates the lad because her man has cheated on her. That probably isn't quite a key to understanding the current atrocities in any of the world’s conflicts.
Perhaps a more improbable moment, though, is one in which Gigi leaves her machine gun near the mother of the lad who has gone missing as she steps across to the other side of the stage to have a tense conversation with the mother, who does cast an eye on that gun.
The first section of the show is bright and funny, the second section is less engaging despite touching on serious issues. As entertainment, the show works. But some of us wanted something more.