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Eyes, hair, mouth: Darkie Armo Girl at Finborough Theatre

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Darkie Armo Girl, Karine Bedrossian’s electrifying one-woman show, commands attention from the moment it begins. First performed in 2022 and revived last year, it now returns for extra performance and it's an event not to miss. The show takes you through the thrills and horrors of a hectic life. She struts, shimmies, and taunts while revealing some horrific truths. She is such an irresistible storyteller that you find yourself hooked. The story is one of fame, glamour, abuse, self-harm, and suicide. If that subject matter doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you haven't seen it delivered with such high energy and provocation. It's currently at the Finborough Theatre . The show's title refers to a slur a popular girl at school once called her. Her ancestry is Armenian, and her parents were from Cyprus, where they fled the civil war and arrived in the UK with nothing. Shortly after she was born in Roehampton. The birth was an emergency C-section that left the baby and ...

Theatre: Over There



Saturday evening I caught Over There, which is a short play having a short run at the Royal Court. The play by Mark Ravenhill, is an interesting enough premise. It is about identical twins separated when their mother flees with one of them to the west. Following the fall of East Germany they meet again. What then takes place is exploring the differences between two ways of life with a smattering of food play and matching underwear thrown in for good measure.

The battle of ideas, socialism versus capitalism and consumerism are brought to the fore and the acting by Harry Treadaway and Luke Treadaway was excellent. Actually at times you did feel for them as the play became more and more harrowing and they had to do weirder and weirder stuff in their matching underwear. I also wondered whether the play could have benefited from more creative direction and imaginative lighting. At times it also felt like it was revisiting the "shock and awe" of Shopping and Fucking. But I guess that at a running length of 65 minutes we can't have everything.

This is part of a series of plays to commemorate 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and runs until later this month. Here's hoping that there are more of these short plays in future. It is great stuff and even if you don't entirely get the matching underwear and food smears, it can be over before you have to think too much about it...

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