Sarai
Arcola Theatre London E8
2 stars

AS THE four musicians enter and take their positions in the Arcola’s intimate basement space, there’s a palpable sense of expectation which builds as the music climbs to a frantic crescendo.

Sarai — who’s been prophetically promised a son and that she will become the mother of a new nation — appears and the incredible physicality of Karlina Grace-Paseda as the eponymous heroine is instantly striking.

Her sincerity — she strains every sinew throughout the production — is no more evident than in the discomfiting opening scene when she endures an excruciating “phantom” pregnancy.

Yet despite Grace-Paseda’s corporeal commitment in pursuing an odyssey of hardship in her search for the promised land, the initial sense of expectation rapidly diminishes as the laboriousness of Paul Anthony Morris’s play becomes apparent.

Aside from a few pulsating flashes where the text gathers real momentum, the overly heightened biblical tales of famine and flood lack substance and begin to grate as the one-woman show unfolds.

The free-form jazz from the quartet of musicians, designed as an integral element in the production, far too often appear disconnected from the action. Rather than being incorporated into the play, they mostly fill in the gaps while Sarai readjusts a set which is far too basic for the landscapes described.

It’s aggravated by some very sloppy lighting, which leaves large parts of the audience in plain view.

Within the Middle Eastern setting, certain segments of dialogue do strike a chord as Sarai talks of “a new nation going up in smoke” or “the boundaries of region having changed” but the overall scope of the stories is so tenuous that it’s difficult to engage with them. The switching of ancient settings from Egypt to Syria and beyond creates a whirlwind narrative that eventually becomes tedious.

Morris’s play promised a great deal but for a work with such grand ambition it falls woefully short of the mark.

Mayer Wakefield