GOD TIMES FIVE
READER’s REPORT by translator Frank Perry
This is Khemiri’s eagerly awaited second play and follows the international success of his dramatic debut: Invasion!
It has parts for five actors: two male and two female; the gender of the fifth player is not pre-determined. The five play some twenty-three roles but have five primary identities.
The play consists of a run-through of a play that school drama teacher ROLF has written together with four of his pupils in theatre studies. The pupils have each been given the task of writing their own dream-scenes based on Strindberg’s A Dreamplay. Since they have not read the play, they interpret the “dream”-concept literally and, as a result, use the scenes allotted to them to portray their own dreams, rather than Strindberg’s. In each scene, one of the “roles” is in the driving seat. Although the balance of power is radically altered in scene 5. Each scene becomes a tool for the exercise of power, self-portrayal and self-betrayal, with everyone getting the chance to play God.
Khemiri’s comic genius lies in structuring the dramatic moment around a notion of identity that is always shifting. The primary “aspects” of the main roles: the narcissistic schoolgirl, the bumbling teacher, the young immigrant wise-guy, the plain jane, etc are, of course, “playing” themselves while simultaneously playing at creating themselves and the other actors. The author’s subtle manipulation of the interplay between their stock identities keeps bringing the audience back to the central issue of the dramatic conceit: who is writing what, whose mask is being lifted, who is playing what role? The related theme of overt and underlying racism in Sweden is explored and exposed as part of the dream scenes of two of the characters (IDRIS and OLIVIA) – in what are some of the play’s funniest sections.
The dialogue is brilliantly snappy, with Khemiri’s trademark linguistic verve and trenchant wit.
Revelations abound throughout the play; and though we come to “see through” (in both senses) the characters, “realist” psychological insight is not the goal. The author manages to dramatise the artifice of language, while making drama from the linguistic interplay between audience expectations (stage conventions) and their “uncovering”. Typically, street language, yoof-speak, slang of different periods all combine with the author’s dazzling linguistic inventiveness to give the play its energy and theatrical impact.
Like its predecessor, God Times Five is ostensibly written for an audience of young people but will enjoy the same kind of crossover appeal which has brought audiences of all age groups into the theatre.
/Frank Perry, translator