Dai (Enough)

To use the word stunning about a play is usually to praise the way it looks or the intellectual impact it makes. When you use it of Dai you use it literally.

Just before a suicide bomber blows up a Tel Aviv café, we have been hearing the stories of the varied individuals gathered there. The bomb doesn't come at the end; it comes as a sudden shock in each monologue. Although you know this will happen and have been forewarned about the loud effects, the sound still comes as a shock that, yes, stuns you, aurally as well as emotionally each time it occurs.

Iris Bahr plays each character, including a Russian prostitute, a German gay man, an elderly Israeli man, a Latina actress and a Palestinian intellectual. Just as they have no idea that a bomb is about to go off, the audience does not know when to expect each death. And how well Bahr handles these. There is an awful reality to each fall and it's in no way lessened by the way she slowly forms herself into the next character.

One of the surprising things about the play is how funny it is because, of course, these are people just getting on with the ordinary inconveniences of everyday life, albeit in a country where everyday life is often not ordinary. Here are people making excuses for their lifestyles, sorting out family complications, lamenting missed opportunities, talking about clothes, children, furniture and jobs.

One of the play's considerable strengths is that it is able to present the multiple viewpoints of a complicated political situation without hectoring. When we hear a lecture on Jewish and Palestinian history it is entirely in character for the speaker, even while she tries to keep her seven children under control.

This is a one-woman play, but I defy you to think of it as such. Seeing all these lives cut short in a single moment constantly repeated is a powerful emotional experience that is stunning in every sense of the word and I found it almost impossible to equate the single actress taking a bow as their sole means of existence.

But she is, and she achieves a tour-de-force that shows us not her as a performer, but a crowded, doomed café. The silent moment of recognition that brings the play full circle is, if anything, even more dramatic than the explosion itself.