The Great Game is a play poised to say something timely and insightful. Set in 1870, D. Tucker Smith's play details a territotail skirmish between Great Britian and Russia called the "Great Game."
The action of the play circles around an interracial romance between Safia Hayward (Anjali Bhimani), an Indian spy working for the British government, and George Hayward (Marcus Dean Fuller), a man who has traveled to India to serve the Crown and escape the gentry.
The audience encounters their romance after the fact, always witnessed in flashbacks. The main action of the play focuses on Safia-who has traveled to England in hopes of preventing an AWOL George from heading out on a suicide mission-and her interactions with George's family.
Even in the main drama, there is the potential for very interesting social, cultural and political comment. At points we sense the melancholy of Britain's invisible and marginalized discontents-women, the underclass, the colonized-and an Indian-British romance condenses these dynamics, bringing them to the stage in very personal form.
The central problem with The Great Game is that it seems scared to make a statement. The set is richly decorated, the costume design and soundtrack are perfectly adequate and a very creative lighting scheme stacks scenes together in a way that makes the stage feel much larger and deeper than it really is. However, Smith's script seems stilted at some of the most vital moments and the drama only rarely becomes truly dramatic (or traumatic).
The play shies away from taking risks, either in pushing the 1870/2007 social-political analogies, or in probing painful issues of racial, sexual and colonial oppression. At the same time it resists revealing emotions and conversations that are more than simply transactional. The most compelling scene in the play involves a near-rape, which is one of the few moments when the drama is intense, eruptive and racialized. It's difficult to watch and yet, oddly enough, you wish The Great Game featured more of these types of moments in the play.
The Great Game previews tonight and opens tomorrow night, Feb. 17. It runs until March 4. Student tickets will be sold for $5.
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