Anyone running a far-right festival would want to keep a close eye on their guest list. Anna and Eireni would immediately arouse suspicion. That is not because of their freshly struck lesbian love affair nor their inclusive leftist politics. Those characteristics would be giveaways, of course, but they would be easy to hide. No, what would surely give the game away for these two student infiltrators is how wholesome they were.
In Debbie Hannan’s breathlessly performed production for Broccoli Arts, Yasemin Özdemir as Eireni (going undercover as “salty” Irina) and Hannah Van Der Westhuysen as Anna (travelling as Anna-Maria) are so well brought up, so precise in their speech, so clearly undamaged by life that any self-respecting fascist would catch them in an instant. It would take more than a pretty white frock and a flowery shirt for these two to get away with going in disguise.
But go in disguise they do and it is something of an anticlimax. In Eve Leigh’s play, they have become agitated by a wave of murderous attacks on residents in their multicultural neighbourhood in an unnamed university town in northern Europe. They are angered by the way the victims are lumped in together, be they Lebanese, Senegalese or Turkish, as if their foreignness somehow accounted for their murders. Determined to act instead of standing passively by, they agree to get to know their enemy with a view to discovering the culprits for the attacks.
They seem more shocked than ever when Jana (Francesca Knight), the far-right official they meet, preaches a creed of political assimilation, calling for respectability over violence, in the manner of leaders such as Marine Le Pen and her aspirations for mainstream acceptance. Their encounter ends gorily all the same, but it somehow teaches them the value of everyday resistance.
Written in a back-and-forth mixture of narration and dialogue, Salty Irina starts off intriguingly elliptical, but becomes more conventional as it proceeds and, whether inspired by real events or not, tells its well-intentioned story at one remove. The play’s heart is in the right place, but the political action lies elsewhere.
At Roundabout @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 27 August
