A play adaptation of the Italian film Perfect Strangers is set to be staged in Dubai, drawing inspiration from the city’s diversity and its association with tennis.
The original film, which follows a group of friends who share all incoming messages and calls during an evening get-together, struck a universal chord when it was released in 2016. It was seen as a parable for relationships and communication in the age of smartphones.
In just under a decade, the film inspired more than two dozen remakes, setting the story within cultural contexts in the Arab world, Armenia, Brazil, Indonesia and India, to name a few. Most of the remakes, however, were conceived for the big screen. Game. Set. Match is one of the few to bring the story to the stage, and the first to give it a regional spin.
The play will run from September 12 to 14 at the Playhouse Studio Theatre at the New Covent Garden in Mall of the Emirates. There will be daily shows at 7.30pm as well as a matinee at 3pm on September 13.
“This is a story that has been done many times,” actor Asad Raza Khan says. “But it’s always been done on screen. If you look at the movie, it’s so well set up for being a stage play. It’s ideal – the set-up, the way the friends play it out – it could make people actually sit in that room where they’re playing the game and having those conversations and make them part of it.”
The premise of Game. Set. Match remains faithful to the original film. A group of friends meet one evening and play a game where they place their phones at the centre of the table and share all incoming calls and messages. Deceptions, affairs and other secrets soon surface, leading to the complete disintegration of their relationships, one notification at a time.
Where the play differs is in the diversity of its cast, a deliberate choice to reflect the multicultural aspect of Dubai and the UAE.
Game. Set. Match also stars Priyanka Johri from India, Reem Tarifi from Lebanon, Mahmoud Basyoni from Egypt, Jenni Schmidt from Germany, Gabriela Ioana from Romania and Ryan Duran, a dual British-French citizen. The team also includes Meghana Dhawan from India, the project's assistant director and creative consultant.
This multicultural roster takes a clear departure from the usual singular-palette cast of many other adaptations.
Yet, when selecting the right actors for the roles, it was not simply a matter of fulfilling a diversity quota. “We wanted to celebrate the Year of the Community,” Khan, who is from Pakistan, says. “It's never been done before, but let's make each and every one of the couples and friends from a different ethnicity, from a different nationality, which represents the UAE.”
Director Satya Baskaran adds that while diversity was central, talent and chemistry ultimately guided the casting process.
“I like to cast actors who will do their homework, who will bring their talent and their flair and will basically just put me in a position where I just need to guide and help shape the big picture,” he says. “The micro character interaction is based on the talent of these actors and more so the dynamic between them.
“That was a massive part of my casting decision. Another thing was how quickly and seamlessly they can shift between comedic and earnest. Because there's a lot about the story that deals with your philosophies on honesty, your philosophies on friendship and your philosophies on love and marriage.”
Another key difference is the setting of the story. Where the original film takes place in a home dinner party, Game. Set. Match is set in a suite in a luxury tennis club. Dubai has a long-standing association with the sport, having hosted the Dubai Tennis Championships since 1993. But another inspiration for the setting – selected by screenwriter Sid Abbas – was the city’s recent fixation with the game padel, a racquet sport adapted from tennis.
“Abbas said ‘let’s do tennis’, because it’s making a comeback with paddle becoming all the fashion,” Khan says. “If you look at our colour palettes and our artworks, it’s all chartreuse green, which is the tennis ball green.”
With the setting, premise and cast in place, the team still had another important element of the story to contend with: the smartphones. The various film adaptations all make the most of the camera’s ability to zoom into notifications, showing messages and callers just as the characters themselves digest the information. But how could that be translated for the stage?
“Satya and I spent weeks chatting about how we will depict this to the audience. We had a lot of ideas, whether to display it on multiple screens or keep displaying it,” says Khan. “Where we gravitated was that this is a theatrical production. The actors, the words and the stage need to be it. People need to be communicated this without modern technology. We've embedded it into the script, and we've embedded it into the way people, the actors, are reacting.”
This decision, Baskaran says, will hopefully prompt a higher level of engagement with the audience. “If a message pops up on a phone, read the character’s reaction,” he says. “There’s no need for you to read the text. Read the body language, facial expressions, reactions of other people to what is coming out and make your own assumptions. Engage with what's going on. You've come, you've taken time out of your evening. Come and engage.”
Game. Set. Match will be the first local production to be staged at the New Covent Garden.
Many long-time residents will remember the venue’s older name: the Dubai Community Theatre and Arts Centre (Ductac), which closed in 2018 and marked the end of the era for the local creative scene. The venue reopened earlier this year with support from London’s famous Pineapple Dance Studios. Its interior was also revamped, but in a way that will still feel familiar to those who frequented Ductac.
“This is where theatre in Dubai started,” Khan says. “It’s really heartwarming that it’s coming back. It's going to be really nostalgic for a lot of the older generation actors and actresses who performed there for it to come back. It’s a very nice moment.”
