Theatre review:Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights

After last year's Metamorphoses, another winter's evening of adult - sometimes very adult - storytelling by candlelight at the Swanamaker. This time it's Hannah Khalil's take on the 1001 Nights, which she reimagines as much less of a one-woman show than it's usually seen as. For Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights, Rosa Maggiora's set is a dungeon, comparatively comfortable with piles of cushions and plates of fruit but a prison nonetheless, where four women have been kept for so long they've lost track of time. When they're joined by a fifth, Fatah the Young (Alaa Habib,) they have to break it to the teenager that the marriage she's been preparing for isn't all it seems: When the King's first wife cheated on him, he vowed revenge on all women. He takes a new wife every night, and after some no-doubt-entirely-consensual sex, murders her. The plan is to eliminate every unmarried woman in his kingdom, and he's nearly done.

Wadiha the Dancer (Houda Echouafni,) Zuya the Warrior (Laura Hanna,) Akila the Writer (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi,) Naha the Wise (Roann Hassani McCloskey) and Fatah are the only ones left awaiting their turn, but nobody's been taken for a couple of days.

Scheherazade was the last to be taken up to the King, and she has a plan to tell him a convoluted series of nested bedtime stories. They'll leave so many threads hanging each night that he'll want to keep her alive to tie them up, but her former cell mates will need to help her come up with the tales themselves. The widowed Wadiha turns out to have had quite the colourful past, which among other things has left her on "friendly" terms with one of their guards, who's agreed to smuggle the stories to Scheherazade.

It's a great framing device to introduce both the premise and the type of stories that originally appeared in the collection - children's stories like Aladdin are of course later additions, while Hakawatis tells us instead that the 1001 Nights tales are mainly about blowjobs. Naha is the main instigator of this, both because she thinks sexy stories are most likely to interest a bloodthirsty king, and because she's just kind of horny on main anyway.

This element helps keep a regular supply of smutty humour in an evening that could have been bleak - after all people, and particularly women, are regularly horribly mistreated both in the framing device and the stories themselves. The storytellers often find ways to give the wrongdoers their comeuppance, but as well as being about women's resilience this is, like most anthologies of this kind, a story about stories: Whether telling personal stories or creating new ones, the women aren't just doing it as a delaying tactic to make sure they live another day, but as a survival technique that helps them keep their sanity in an insane situation.

If I've got one main criticism it's that I wish Khalil and director Pooja Ghai had found more opportunities to really let the actors let loose with their performances: A highlight is a convoluted shaggy dog story about a literal shaggy dog*, largely because it's presented as the women improvising its twists and turns, taking on the characters as they create them - we've been gradually getting to know the women's personalities as well, so it's satisfying to see the ways they inform and direct the tale. The first act gradually opens up its storytelling style culminating in this mad caper, so it's a bit of a letdown when the second returns mostly to a more traditional single-storyteller technique. But overall this is a layered, entertaining and surprising evening, with a lot more nudging and winking about girthy courgettes than the picture-book version.

Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights by Hannah Khalil is booking in repertory until the 14th of January at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz.

*or if not shaggy, definitely quite a cunnilingusy dog