Review: BORDERS BY HENRY NAYLOR at Holden Street Theatres

Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Wednesday 14th February 2018

Gilded Balloon and Redbeard Theatre, in association with Holden Street Theatres, are presenting Borders, a sensational two-hander featuring Avital Lvova and Graham O'Mara. She plays a young Syrian woman living under the Assad regime, who calls herself Nameless, and he plays, Sebastian Nightingale, an English would-be photojournalist who is trying, with little success, to get his career started. We follow each of their gradually converging stories in this fourth play in his Arabian Nightmares series, following The Collector, Echoes, and Angel.

Sebastian is funded, whenever times are hard, by his father. Her father is taken from her in a playground when she is only six. He is an artist with his camera. She is an anonymous graffiti artist, protesting against Assad. He has a comfortable home in England. Her home is destroyed in the civil war. He is given an opportunity by veteran journalist, John Messenger, and is suddenly the photographer whom everybody wants, after taking a photo of emerging billionaire warlord, Osama Bin Laden. She is provided with spray paint cans, and occasional assistance, by a young man with a shop and a van. He ends up photographing high profile celebrities for huge sums of money. She ends up heavily pregnant and fleeing Syria on a leaky old boat that sinks in high seas. Their lives could hardly be more different, and how they collide is the dramatic climax of the play.

Nameless goes through a lot in this brief early part of her life, seeing all aspects of her life being destroyed around her, and Lvova expresses her character's emotions with great power and eloquence. If you are one of those people who have mindlessly accepted the Australian Government's label of "illegal immigrants", people who should be incarcerated and mistreated for daring to try to escape to a safe place, then this will make you think again and begin reusing the correct term, "refugees". Sadly, those who have accepted that appalling propaganda are most unlikely to attend this production.

Through photojournalist turned celebrity photographer, Sebastian Nightingale, and John Messenger, who is declared redundant and fired from his job of over forty years as an investigative journalist, we can witness, in microcosm, the decline and fall of journalism and its replacement with pure, unadulterated pap; fake news, which allows the propagation of the false notion that refugees are in the wrong and must be vilified.

Lvova is magnificent as Nameless, the power and intensity of her performance, the immense level of anger that she displays through her character, terrifyingly realistic. It is impossible to remain unfeeling in the face of all that Nameless goes through, brought into sharp focus in the hands of Lvova.

O'Mara brings the comic relief from the plight of Nameless, Sebastian's self-deprecating humour giving us moments of much-needed respite. He delivers an excellent performance in the role whilst also illuminating the story of Nameless by placing it in juxtaposition against his own character.

Tickets are bound to sell quickly so don't delay, book soon.