Culture Wars
Dolan Cummings
August 2004 (online)

This is something of a departure for Van Badham, whose previous Fringe shows have included Kitchen, a domestic allegory of industrial relations, and Camarilla, an exploration of the left's response to the war on terror. While Nikolina is equally concerned with politics, and specifically feminist politics, the plot and dramatic development are more complicated than in Badham's previous work.

The play operates on several levels. We begin in a cafe in Sheffield, where a couple of obnoxious Southern students are giving the waitress a hard time. Gradually over the course of the play, we learn that she is a Croatian Serb refugee who has fled the national and personal horror of the war. (Various references place the action in the early 1990s.)

As things develop, Nikolina unwittingly finds herself squaring a love triangle, and as things turn ugly we are reminded of the experiences that brought her to this 'glamorous career as waitress in north of England'. Nikolina was inspired by the notorious stories about Premiership footballers taking advantage of young women in hotel rooms, and the play suggests a parallel between the routine rape of women in war and the alleged rampant misogyny of Western culture in general - a common currency of conquest and humiliation.

The parallel is interesting at a symbolic level, much as it is illuminating to see the Abu Graib photos as a grim apotheosis of the debased contemporary culture seen more widely in reality TV. But Badham's attempt to establish a more literal parallel seems forced, and involves a transformation in at least one character that just doesn't ring true.

Nonetheless, Nikolina succeeds in taking Badham's finger-on-the-pulse approach to political theatre to a new level of sophistication with its exploration of the various ways in which individual agency is compromised and undermined. The interweaving plot-lines are carried well by the cast, and Emma Forster is particularly impressive in the title role, slipping between Serbian-accented English and a northern burr to indicate the character's mother tongue.

The play's weaknesses stem largely from the fact that Badham has set herself the task of dealing with very new themes to do with consent and indeed subjectivity, that don't lend themselves to conventional ways of thinking. That ambition itself is something to be admired.

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