PLAY REVIEW: Arcana ★★★

There is something suitably incantatory about Arcana, Fay Guiffo’s poetic music-theatre piece about finding the courage to hear your own voice. Guiffo plays a 16-year-old apprentice composer caught between devotion to her Emperor father and a yearning for artistic freedom, but this is less conventional coming-of-age drama than a dream assembled from sound, movement and shadow.

A French-Cameroonian violinist, Guiffo makes the instrument both character and narrator. Classical passages collide with African musical traditions, while English, French and Ghomala’ fold into one another. The effect is at once intimate and mythic: the sparse stage becomes a kingdom, a battlefield and an interior landscape. The darkness can occasionally feel over-insistent, but it also sharpens the ear, making each scrape of bow, recorded texture and sudden burst of colour feel significant.

Guiffo’s performance is physically economical but emotionally expansive, sketching multiple characters with tiny shifts of posture and voice. Under the direction of Jaïrus Obayomi, with dramaturgy by Ruth Ese Ighorae and movement by Hannah Venet, the piece resists the temptation to over-explain its allegory.

It is an ambitious debut, sometimes more evocative than dramatically precise. But when Guiffo raises her violin, Arcana finds something powerful: a reminder that liberation may begin simply by listening to the voice you have been taught to silence.