Spanish Oranges at The Playground Theatre: A Sharp, Intimate Portrait of Ambition
Spanish Oranges at The Playground Theatre is a razor-sharp new play written by Alba Arikha and directed by Myriam Cyr. Staged as a world premiere at this intimate West London fringe venue, the production stars Maryam D’Abo, Jay Villiers and Arianna Branca in a tale that unfolds over a single turbulent morning and examines love, ambition, truth and the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. With a creative team committed to new voices and bold material, this debut theatre piece blends emotional tension and incisive dialogue in a way that feels both cinematic and immediate.
The show opens on a quiet domestic scene that quickly tightens into tension: Fiona, a novelist on the verge of major success, steps into a narrow strip of light while Ivo, her husband and once-celebrated actor, watches from the shadowed edge of the room. That simple spatial divide, which is light and dark on the same floorboards, becomes a visual shorthand for the shifting power dynamics that fuel the entire play.
What Spanish Oranges does particularly well is let emotion live in the pauses and glances between lines. When Fiona quietly declares, “You write their endings, I write ours,” the words land because we’ve already seen her gaze flicker with both resolve and doubt. This isn’t a play that tells you what to feel; it builds feeling through gestures, phrasing and timing, weaving ambiguity into every exchange rather than opting for tidy explanations.
Maryam D’Abo gives a nuanced performance as Fiona, showing confidence on the surface yet vulnerable beneath her poise. Her physical stillness in moments of confrontation anchors the scene, inviting you to listen as closely to what isn’t said as to what is. Jay Villiers’ Ivo carries a quiet intensity that crescendos through the morning, his posture shifting ever so slightly as he recalibrates between pride, frustration and longing. Arianna Branca’s Lydia adds emotional texture, her presence softening and enriching the play’s rhythms in unexpected ways.
Creative elements like sound and lighting work in tandem with the script to underline the emotional terrain. Subtle lighting choices trace the arc of the day, while careful sound cues help punctuate key turns in the narrative.
In a tight 90-minute run, Spanish Oranges proves itself a thoughtful, exacting look at how art and personal life collide. It doesn’t lean on spectacle; instead, it finds dramatic power in the precise collision of voices and the questions we keep asking about truth, success, and the stories we inherit and reinvent.
