[title]
Jasmine Naziha Jones’s semi-autobiographical debut play is an impassioned if scattershot tribute to her Iraqi father and the weight that second-generation immigrants bear. It’s told via the experiences of Darlee, a young Iraqi-English woman with a similar background to Jones, who we can be pretty sure is a surrogate for her because she’s literally playing the role herself.
It does feel like a very bold choice to programme in the Royal Court’s main house, however. Though it manages to combine charming nostalgic reflections – amusing flashbacks to her father’s days as a fish out of water student in ‘80s London – with a tremendous climactic speech from Jones/Darlee, in which she spells out the terrible effect of Western sanctions on the lives of ordinary Iraqis, it leans extremely heavily on Milli Bhatia’s hyperactive, acid-bright production to give it a semblance of coherence.
The majority of the play is set in some sort of limbo in which for whatever reason a trio of colourfully suited figures – played by Souad Faress, Hayat Kamille and Noof Ousellam – are recreating episodes from Darlee’s life. It feels like some sort of judgement is occurring. But it never really comes to anything: they just seem like an over-elaborate device to string a series of slightly disparate scenes together.
The thing is, Bhatia’s jerky, disruptive style is being put to use telling a story that might have been better served by a more conventional production. The writing is not in itself particularly leftfield, but instead of a smooth, clear narrative, we get a succession of vignettes that do form a wider picture, but leave Philip Arditti’s Dad and Jones’s Farlee feeling like underdeveloped characters. It feels like an experimental visual language has been strained for because it’s a Royal Court show, rather than because it’s what the story really needed. The sanctions monologue is thunderously powerful, but it might have been even more so if we’d had a better sense of Darlee’s life up to that point.
‘Baghdaddy’ is a genuinely promising debut that very much feels like the work of an early years playwright and might have been better served by the Court’s smaller Upstairs theatre. Hopefully Jones will get another shot at a big stage a couple of plays down the line.