Darkie Armo Girl – Finborough Theatre

Darkie Armo Girl is a dizzying one woman show that, despite being filled with incredible details, fails to translate the writer’s experiences into a compelling show.

The play is a piece of confessional theatre. Writer and performer Karine Bedrossian takes us through her life experiences which are chaotic and many. We hear of numerous difficult childhood experiences and unsettling summer holidays. She takes us through careers as a receptionist, a singer, a dancer, a model, a bartender and a stripper. There are tales of drug abuse, sexual assault, rehab, and Jerry Springer.

Told to you by a friend at the pub, any one of these vignettes would be an incredible story. Put together on a stage, they become a morass. There is far too much here and the result is that the stories bleed into one another, the potential impact of each one dampened by a process of inundation. So while you want to listen, understand and sympathise with a fascinating life story, what you are shown becomes repetitive and therefore a little boring. It also means that the question of the impact of the Armenian genocide – something the show’s description suggests is central – appears only at the start of the show. This chimes oddly, and I leave wishing the impacts of this had been more genuinely explored, rather than just mentioned.

Bedrossian as a performer has positives and negatives. She certainly brings the huge amount of energy required to sustain a one person show, and is capable of cracking a good joke or two. Unfortunately, in other respects her performance is a little basic. Physical gestures are used in a demonstrative fashion: showing you what that friend did, what she saw in that moment, telling us we are in a new space or time. It’s a physical style that doesn’t really pull the audience into the world being described.

There are certainly moments which show promise. Mim Houghton’s set design has a nice trick where it is dismantled at the end. Bedrossian’s discussion of anorexia is easily the play’s best explored scene and her recollection of a strange, neglected girl who she would see on her summer holidays, is arresting. Likewise, her recollection of a life coach’s speech is genuinely funny. But overall, this is a show that is simply overfull and gets stuck at the surface of things.

James Baldwin has best described the challenge of using experiences to make art. He said ‘if it hurt you, that is not what is important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important… is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive… your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain.’ This is perhaps where this show falls down. For all the incredible, difficult details of Bedrossian’s life, the play she has created does not seek to reach out to others, it does not tell us about what it is like to be alive.

Reviewer: Ralph Jeffreys

Reviewed: 24 January 2025

North West End UK Rating: