Theatre review: Dugsi Dayz

Acting as a soft launch for his first season in charge of the Royal Court, David Byrne (not that one) offers up a short run for a show that had previously played at his former venue, the New Diorama: Dugsi Dayz is Sabrina Ali's twist on The Breakfast Club, replacing a group of 20th century American High School archetypes with four 21st century teenage Somali-British girls who've been made to do an hour's Saturday detention at their mosque, as punishment for haram acts they're not actually obliged to tell each other about, thank you very much. The characters don't have exact parallels with the John Hughes film, so it would be labouring the point a bit to make them. But let's do that anyway. Munira (Ali) and Yasmin (Faduma Issa) are the Emilio Estevez / Molly Ringwald cool kids, friends who can't seem to do anything without the other filming it for TikTok.

Salma (Susu Ahmed) gets the Anthony Michael Hall* role of the geek as she's the most genuinely religious of the four, to the extent that everyone considers it a wonder she's managed to get into any trouble in the first place, and Yasmin and Munira relentlessly make fun of her for being a goody-goody.

For the dark and mysterious mix of Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson we have Hani (Hadsan Mohamud,) genuinely something of a mystery to her classmates as she disappeared from the area and from school two years earlier. Assumed to be gone for good she reappeared just as suddenly, with no explanation and with a new, moody attitude (that's not entirely backed up by her poppy taste in music.) The way the other girls tease her is mixed with a genuine fear of her, and the way the actresses play this body language is one of the funniest running gags in the show.

And make no mistake, this is a very funny play, and it's an interesting start to a new Royal Court era because of it: While the venue's rightly known for producing some great plays over the years, I've not always associated it with subtlety when dealing with issue-based stories, and even the more comic plays have had a tendency to slam on the brakes to tell us the moral of the tale. Dugsi Dayz is a play that takes us into a world of teenage muslim girls in a way that will resonate to people from that community, and illuminate for the rest of us, and there are moments when darker elements are hinted at. But even in a revelation about a particularly nasty betrayal by one of the girls' mothers there's a sense that the characters remain true to what we've seen before, and keep that humour and energy.

Because we're firmly in comedy ground here - if there's cultural points being made it's done through drawing the audience in with the shared experience of Ali's ear for dialogue (a nice line in the highly specific proving universal) and the way Poppy Clifford's cast deliver and build on it. If anything the play's a deconstruction of more didactic storytelling, as the girls compete to make up horror stories like the ones their mothers told them to make them behave, and generally end up tripping over themselves in figuring out what the point is supposed to be. Ali herself has no such problem, as she keeps the laughs coming in a way that effortlessly show us the characters and community she wants us to share in. As a 3-week transfer of a play that's already been successful elsewhere I don't know how much we can take this as a statement of intent from Byrne, but if so it feels like a promising departure from the previous few regimes at the venue.

Dugsi Dayz by Sabrina Ali is booking until the 18th of May at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: WoodForge Studios.

*I feel like we don't talk enough about how insane Anthony Michael Hall's career is, consisting of two wildly contrasting bits of typecasting that have kept him in never-the-star-but-always-working mode: First the skinny, bullied, lovable nerd in every single 1980s teen movie, then the grizzled old bruiser with optional heart of gold, with a very abrupt bridge between the two in Edward Scissorhands. Honestly the only common point between the two careers is that his characters probably aren't getting any, first because they were firmly friendzoned, now because they're Too Damaged To Ever Get Close To Anyone.