Samo is Dead, co-written and directed by Edward Saatchi and Michael Donkor, is a new one-act play running at the Burton Taylor Theatre. It is a vignette, a snapshot of a particular place and time. The time in question being nineteen eighty seven, and the place being New York or, to be more precise, the New York Art Scene.

Samo is Dead is centred around an artist by the name - or, technically, pseudonym - of Samo. Although the play is centred around him, he does not, in fact, ever appear onstage. Rather, the play focuses on his girlfriend (Sophie Kainredl), his former dealer (Jack Reame), and Andy Warhol (Richard Greenberg). These three people, over the course of the play, bicker and intrigue and quote Othello against one another; each in their own way attempting to control the eponymous artist.

This play is, ultimately, about Warhol and his world. It is a rather damning portrait; Warhol is presented as a selfish, arrogant bitch, concerned only with his own petty advantage. The other two characters in the play are little better, but they are in a sense victims, caught in Warhol's little world (and a little world it is - containing as it does only three characters and two or three locations). The world presented in this play is vain, hypocritical and shallow. It's an amusing place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

The play is well scripted. The characters are almost always drunk, stoned, or simply in love with the sounds of their own voices. As a result the dialogue has an unreal, stream-of-consciousness quality to it. This unreal quality is magnified by the fact that the characters frequently slip into and out of quotations from Othello. This device works better than you might imagine. The lines seem remarkably natural, indeed it takes a while to work out where the quotes end and the original dialogue begins.

The theme of race holds an interesting position within the play. "Samo" is black, and is repeatedly identified with the Moor of Shakespeare's tragedy. The play, however, does not deal with racism per se. Rather; Samo's race is treated as a gimmick by Warhol and the art world. I personally found this rather refreshing. It's good to see a production about a black man that doesn't involve him struggling against prejudice.

All in all, then, the play is an enjoyable way to pass an hour of your evening. The cast all do well in their roles, and the New York accents hold together well enough (the occasional vowel sound catches strangely, but this is only to be expected). If you're interested in keeping up with new developments in Oxford drama, or if you're just at a loose end at 9.30 some time this week, then this is certainly worth a look.

Dan Hemmens, 10/11/04