Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain and Maanuv Thiara Photo Credit: Lidia Crisafulli.
Simon Jenner, October 30th 2024
“I think God wants us to learn more and more things,” says Babur (Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain), to sceptical conformist Humayun (Maanuv Thiara). But then Humayun’s father is top-brass and scornful of his son. Which is why these two have the lowest-grade job. It’s 1648 and they’re not allowed to look at what they’re protecting before it’s finished. Rajiv Joseph’s 2016 off-Broadway award-winner Guards at the Taj is revived in the UK by Adam Karim at the Orange Tree till November 16th.
Its UK premiere at the Bush in 2017 seemed prescient. It involves the (false) myth that 20,000 (imported Persian) workers were behanded along with the architect, so no-one could match the Taj’s beauty. At that point Qatar’s imported laborers were dying to finish the World Cup stadium.
But this Rosencrantz/Godot-esque two-hander spanning 90 minutes pre-echoes a new play at the Arcola: Josh Azouz’s Gigi & Dar where two young women guard a stretch of desert. Revival of one and writing of the other seem at least serendipitous.
Like all those plays Guards turns on a funny-and-straight act of wit, hilarity, heartbreak and here as with Gigi & Dar, disturbing violence. But it’s Humayun who comes up with the idea of portable holes, and starts sounding like Stephen Hawking when Newton wasn’t quite six. Babur inevitably finds holes in the argument (like the transport sack), and fills them with more.
Maanuv Thiara Photo Credit: Lidia Crisafulli.
Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain and Maanuv Thiara Photo Credit: Lidia Crisafulli.
Joseph’s exploration of the arbitrariness of absolute power is timeless though, threaded through with the cost of beauty. Karim writes of the corruption of “the struggle for the soul of our country amidst advanced capitalism. This is not a period piece.”
Up to a point. Aesthetics and absolutism work differently and are literally in plain sight. Late capitalism isn’t late till it’s dead, as some point out. As a state of mind though it has more in common with Babur’s stark conception of beauty and its costs, than soft targets like rulers and hierarchy. Empires fall more easily than mindsets, though are certainly connected.
Hussain’s bright-eyed, garrulous Babur chafes at this job, pines for the impossible top posting to guard the Harem. “It’s just a government department like everything else” Humayun dismisses the pipe-dream; they’ll never reach it. But miracles and calamities – or portable holes to fall through – happen.
Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain and Maanuv Thiara Photo Credit: Lidia Crisafulli.
Hussain’s bright-eyed, garrulous Babur chafes at this job, pines for the impossible top posting to guard the Harem. “It’s just a government department like everything else” Humayun dismisses the pipe-dream; they’ll never reach it. But miracles and calamities – or portable holes to fall through – happen.
Hussain’s Babur is engagingly nagging, swervy and full of switchback. Babur pushes even Humayun to flights of fancy. Thiara’s particularly fine at Humayun’s watchfulness: the conformist mind schooled in one thing yet desperate in this wild friendship to even imagine something beyond black holes. Thiara registers the subtext of what’s being said, warmly responding then warning then inscrutable when lines are ignored. The timing of both is a delight.
So after one horrendous action (there is stage blood), Babur thinks they’ve “killed beauty” and warps into a different world; one traumatised yet enlightened. It’s also suicidal and sets the two at odds. What can be done? Humayun desperately calculates.
Roisin Jenner’s simple octagonal plinth with a vertical central column, more a pole, involves a few props, notably a chopping block; and changes of clothes with exits and entrances. Elliot Griggs projects two red-lit grilles from below like a bijou chamber of horrors with more benign lighting; Xana’s sound involves offstage screams. Niraj Chag’s music underscores this as a contemporary fable, not a far silk pavilion of antiquity.
Joseph moves from the static Rosencrantz-like eddy at the start to furious engagement punctuated with a disturbing scene and ended by another. As a critique of capitalism it doesn’t land. As a fable on the authoritarian drift of democracies, underpinned by capitalism, it works better: though predates post-2016 populism. Author of The Road to Serfdom Friedrich Hayek told an admiring Thatcher that after Pinochet’s Chile pioneered neo-liberalism he felt democracy wasn’t in capitalism’s interest. A fable on the mercantile greatness of Mughal India (ultimately crushed by Britain like a corporate take-over with guns) might reveal much.
At its end, you’re left wondering if Guards’ kernel is human: how power’s gravity crushes the strength to dream, even friendship itself. With two 1984s currently playing, it’s good that theatre at least asks questions political leaders everywhere try to shut down. And Guards at the Taj continues to fascinate.
Writer Rajiv Joseph, Director Adam Karim, Set and Costume Designer Roisin Jenner, Lighting Designer Elliot Griggs, Composer Niraj Chag, Sound Designer Xana, Movement Director Kane Husbands, Casting Director Matilda James CDG
Production & Technical Director Phil Bell, Senior Production Technician Andrew Owen Cook, Production Technician Priya Virdee, CSM Jade Gooch, DSMs Josette Shipp, ASM Madeleine Lawless, Production Electrician Chris Galler, Costume Support Emma Kylmala, Lead Scenic Painter Anita Gander, Scenic Painter Sophie Firth
Thanks to Lizzi Adams for rehearsal cover and “Pigs Might Fly” Theatrical Blood Supplier.
