Like 'Antigone' But Not As Good

Mohamed-Zain Dada's 'Dizzy' Mishandles An Ancient Myth

Brendan Barclay (Stax) and Sera Mustafa (Qamar) in Dizzy. Photo credit: Chris Saunders.

Many years ago I visited the West Bank as a guest of the cultural wing of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation. Yes, it existed and the aim of the 100 Artists project was to promote… well, I can’t remember exactly. Peace? Awareness? Solidarity? My own agenda was to give both sides a piece of my mind. That resolution failed when the Palestinians I met in beseiged Ramallah behaved with enormous kindness, patience and dignity towards me — even when I was doing dumb things like using too much water in the shower or watching CNN.

It was post-9/11, a period of both suicide bombings and repeated incursions into Palestinian territory by Israeli military forces. The danger cannot be over-estimated: Foreigners, notably American peace activist Rachel Corrie, subsequently died at the hands of Israeli Defence Forces. To avoid detection as we moved between different areas of the Palestinian patchwork we travelled frequently at night; one road was nicknamed Death Alley. “But don’t worry, it’s been fairly quiet over the past few weeks.”

Having risked my neck for the Palestinians — I was so close to the action that I heard gunfire from my hotel room — I have limited patience with those who would lecture me about “Islamophobia”. Especially when that lecture comes from theatre-makers one strongly suspects have never been further east than Waltham Forest. Yes, I know the Israeli-Arab conflict is a longstanding, brutal war of colonial occupation. I went there. I saw it. But I also take issue with a standard theatrical trope which treats ‘Islamophobia’ as something that has dropped from a clear blue sky, a malign and irrational product of the West’s Orientalist imagination, and in particular of white, middle-class and very long-suffering theatre audiences. Does it really have nothing to do with such atrocities as the Bataclan massacre or the MEN Arena bombing? Anyone who lived in the UK during the IRA’s murderous mainland campaigns of the 1970s-1990s will remember the widespread British hostility towards the Irish at that time. Palestinians hate Israelis for taking their land. Israelis hate Palestinians for both the documented and wildly unsubstantiated alleged brutalities of Oct 7th. It’s how people are, it’s what people do. It’s how things roll on Planet Earth — we’ve known it since Aeschylus — and it doesn’t need a concocted ‘ism’ to explain it.

Having got that off my chest, I must say ‘Dizzy’ wasn’t primarily about Islamophobia. It was a story of universal application — a young woman, just a child really, is trying to come to terms with grief in the aftermath of her elder brother’s death. So far, so Antigone. But my viewing pleasure was frequently interrupted by the obligatory political references — to Gaza, to Islamic State runaway Shemima Begum — that were shoehorned in by the writer. I’d be happy to watch a political play on either of these subjects, but this one was about a child’s life ripped apart by grief. A Muslim child in a Muslim family but on a human theme. My generation of young writers assumed, given the general state of humanity, that we had a duty towards Peace. We tried to find the universality in things. This generation is happy to be divisive, and to serve up those divisive philosophies to children too.

Sera Mustafa (Qamar) in Dizzy. Photo credit: Chris Saunders

It was a shame. Antigone in the Underpass, with spray-can art, has definite appeal. This American indiginous artform has long fascinated Europeans. Italian art dealer Claudio Bruni staged the first gallery exhibition, in Rome, as early as the late 1970s. My art school friends in Oxford were treated to a talk by a visiting New York graffiti artist in about 1983-84 — probably as part of a broader, industry-driven push to create a European market for the works. Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s seminal ‘Subway Art’ was published in 1984 and reprinted in 1987. It was reputedly 1984’s most shoplifted book. I bought my copy in the Mall Galleries gift shop in London.

And the patient zero of this new movement? Jean-Michael Basquiat, a New Yorker of Haitian extraction who by 1978 was already spray-painting across Lower Manhatten, and whose Untitled (1982) was sold in 2017 to a Japanese billionaire for $110.5m. (Unfortunately, the artist himself did not live long enough to enjoy any real wealth. He died of a heroin overdose when he was 27 years old.)

The marginalised as mainstream. The mainstream marginalised. This is the world we live in now. So it is unsurprising that this most counter-cultural of offerings has come from an elite stable. Mohamed-Zain Dada’s first writing credit, Emily (Glitched) In Paris was for the Royal Court Theatre’s Living Newspaper series in March 2021. He is an alumnus of BBC Drama Room’s 2022-23 cohort and the National Film & Television School x Left Bank Pictures (The Crown) inaugeral Diverse Writer’s Room Programme 2024. His debut play, Blue Mist, debuted at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in 2023 and was nominated for an Olivier Award.

His talent is not in doubt, but it is also true that he has locked on, with the force of a laser-guided missile, to writer development resources that in practice are only accessible in the capital. Growing up in London he has benefitted from the geographic privilege available to those within easy travelling distance of the city centre. In today’s divided Britain, fuel prices and housing costs determine the shape of peoples’ lives, and it is no longer possible to tell who is marginal and who is mainstream.

Sophocles’ Antigone was written in about 441BC and tells the story of an aristocratic young woman (she is the daughter of Oedipus) who rescues her brother’s corpse from a civil-war battlefield to give it the last rites. The Ancient Greeks expected female relatives to wash and lay out dead bodies, so Antigone is following a well-understood and important religious tradition. But in doing so, she incurrs the wrath of King Creon who has ordered that her brother’s body should lie in the open as a warning to other insurgents.

This ancient Theban myth, which predates even Sophocles’ theatrical treatment of it, finds echoes in Dizzy. Qamar is grieving her elder brother’s death. Trying to mourn at the place where he fell, she runs into Stax who is attempting to ‘tag’ in the spot she now regards as sacred.

Words ensue. Angry words. And from that moment, the high emotional pitch of this 55-minute drama never slackens. The set consists of a stumpy podium constructed of geometric boxes painted graffiti-style in bright colours. The continuous performance consists of words and the physical theatre of the two actors.

The anger gushed out, and anger means conflict. Or does it? Even when I could decipher the Multicultural London English (not always the case), I found it oddly unengaging. Why? On reflection, I find that what was structurally missing from the play was actual conflict.

Conflict is more than just noise. When Antigone disobeys Creon, they are on a collision course. And Creon has life-or-death power over her, which he exerts. When Qamar scolds Stax, he laughs at her. And when it is revealed that Stax was her brother’s best mate, and that he too is there to honour him, even that area of disagreement evaporates. From then on, it’s My Fair Lady with spray-paint cans — except the tunes aren’t as good.

I daresay most young playwrights are apt to confuse drama with shouting. But look how much tension and pain Jane Austen extracts from a genteel trip to a ribbon shop. And the ferocity of the characters in the 1980s sitcom Yes, Minister is disguised behind weary smiles and an elegant bon mot. The only thing that matters in drama is what’s at stake. In Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin it’s a large sum of money and that’s why the rest of her story slots into place.

I am happy to step into an imagined world in which it is the religious duty of a dead graffiti artist’s younger sister to tag his name on the highest structure in the district. But that isn’t the world Zain creates. In his imagined world, Qamar’s sudden desire to do so is not a sacrament, it’s a whim.

Antigone is a great play because it poses deep questions about individual conscience versus the power of the state. Both Antigone and Creon believe they have right on their side; both have the arguments to prove it. But Dizzy, where it works best, is essentially a poetic monologue about the crippling power of grief. Sera Mustafa plays a blinder as Qamar, capturing the emotional instability of a clever young woman whose family life has been shattered. Under movement director Yami “Rowdy” Lofvenberg, she is by turns an awkward crab and a floating bird.

And if, in comparison, Brendan Barclay as Stax comes across as a spare part, that’s because he is. At best, he’s a kind of Gandalf figure. He’s the magician or trickster who guides her through the portal to adventures which, in this case, turned out all too predictable. It’s all kinda low-energy in plot terms, though highly decorated with pretty words. Qamar deserves a more fearsome antagonist — a psychopathic member of the British Transport Police, or a rival graffiti artist who hated her brother and perhaps even pushed him off the edge. I wanted giant lumps of concrete to be dropped on her, I wanted her to be arrested. I wanted the person she now hates most in the world to rescue her from an onrushing train.

Plotwise, I have vulgar tastes. But theatre is a low artform that can never stray too far from its ancient roots. Poetry, now, that’s different. And I can’t help wondering if Dizzy as it is wouldn’t have worked better as a solo spoken-word performance.

Photo by Sergi Viladesau on Unsplash

“Kids write graffiti because it’s fun. It’s also an expression of the longing to be somebody in a world that is always reminding you that you’re not.” So wrote Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff in their introduction to ‘Spraycan Art’ (Thames And Hudson, 1987).

I get that. But one hallmark of a subculture is that its moral system can drift markedly from that which prevails in wider society. Whether it’s groups of prison inmates, tabloid reporters, police officers or ‘taggers’, a topsy-turvey ethical system can become entrenched and even seem virtuous to those inside the cult.

The production team for Dizzy apparently spoke to hundreds of young people in their research for the play. That tagging is still popular is visible for all to see. I passed spray-painted wagons in sidings on my train journey to Sheffield. The Graffiti Removal Company claims on its website that graffiti removal costs more than £1bn every year in the UK. They also make the point that most of it is tagging, and by their own metric only a small fraction achieves the status of art.

I am a sincere advocate for landscaped gardens and public sculpture. It’s palpably true that these project a subliminal message that the communal space is cared for, and that civic order prevails. A case study of the Marcus Garvey Clubhouse in Brownsville, Brooklyn (Treskon & Esthappan, 2018) found that curated space involving young people, which gave them a place where they could congregate, perform music and create art, did indeed have a noticeable impact on perceptions of community safety. It is just one of a myriad of such studies.

Graffiti does the opposite. One wonders how many wealthy art dealers, who have made spray-can art such big business, have ever had to walk a dingy underpass on their way home from work. Not least of the ironies is that my intention to watch Dizzy at the press performance was foiled by the theft of copper signal cabling somewhere between Hull and Goole. The British Transport Police exist for a reason, and I’m glad they do. It’s a pity that so much of their energy is wasted on keeping taggers off the lines.

The energy of spray-can art is undeniable. And its brief but vibrant existence before the authorities get to work on it is, as Zain observes, a useful lesson in impermanence. Good on him for embracing an artform — theatre — that is disapproved of by Muslim religious conservatives.¹ (This may account for the complete absence of headscarves in the audience for a production that featured a headscarfed women in its publicity.)

But I can’t help wondering if this play is proof that the theatre world, too, operates within a hermetically sealed value system that has drifted far away from the world of the ordinary citizen. A talented young writer of promise who didn’t buy into the dominant ideologies simply wouldn’t be able to follow the same development path that Zain did. They’d have to go elsewhere, to YouTube for instance, and find a creative home there.

Maybe that, on multiple levels, is the real lesson of Dizzy.

Dizzy, a collaboration between Sheffield Theatres and Theatre Centre, runs at the Sheffield Playhouse until Oct 12 (£22), before travelling to The Hawth, Crawley, Nov 9 (£5 & £10) and London’s Half Moon Theatre, Nov 14-16, £8.

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1. Schimmel, A. , Landau, . Jacob M. , Grabar, . Oleg , Allen, . Roger M.A. , Bruijn, . J.T.P. de and Shiloah, . Amnon. "Islamic arts." Encyclopedia Britannica, November 11, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-arts.