Review: Darkie Armo Girl, Finborough Theatre

If this autobiographical one-woman show had a subtitle, it might be ‘How My Life Turned Into A Slow-Motion Car Crash While I Fearlessly Kept Plunging into Abusive Situations”. Karine Bedrossian’s life story has many lurid ingredients (domestic violence, overnight success, eating disorders, a pervert therapist, debauched music executives, stripping, abortions, betrayal, rehab, toxic relationships, homelessness…). The one part she does not play is the victim. She tells her tale with dark humour. It is deeply relatable and never dull. The audience admires the feistiness of the younger Karine and feels disgust at the male behaviour she has experienced, plus dismay at how, repeatedly, young Karine defies her current abuser only to then turn the blame on herself. She crashes down through layer after layer of emotional catastrophe until she reaches a point where the only way is up. But this is not a misery memoir. Bedrossian’s story-telling is swift, sassy and ironic. The most painful scenes are told fast and impressionistically, with the Bedrossian of today moving us on with a mocking shrug at her previous capacity to make bad choices. “I’m like a slot machine whose currency is sex, semen and sadism,” she derides her younger self at one point.

So why did her life go wrong? This is how her personal story connects with the theme alluded to in the title – the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks last century. Bedrossian implies that her Armenian family are so traumatised by recent history that they have lost some capacity for tenderness with children. Ignoring her baby, her mother goes straight back to work after giving birth. From age five, little Karine is packed off alone for weeks each summer to stay with family in Cyprus, where often the only person who notices her is ‘Rag Eater’, a disabled girl tied to a chair next door. Karine concludes that she must be ugly and unloveable. Her emptiness inside is a physical pain. She spends decades abandoning herself as thoroughly as her parents abandoned her. She picks boyfriends as empty and damaged as herself. The contempt implicit in the title ‘Darkie Armo Girl’ refers to her own self-hatred as well as the external abuse she experienced. Bedrossian’s portrayal of habitual emotional agony is believable. It is also incredibly brave.

After the show I wished that I could talk to her, to ask why – why put your abuse and your mistakes out there on stage every night? Isn’t it painful? She often refers in the piece to an inability to feel her own emotions, but Bedrossian is not disconnected from her story. She has used her anger and her dark humour to shape a challenging statement – about herself, about women, about the treatment of Armenians, about relations between the sexes – with the same fearlessness as she seems to have lived the rest of her life. She has plenty to be angry about. The Me Too movement has revealed an ocean of abuse like Bedrossian’s. Unbelievably, the UK government still has not recognised the Armenian genocide, in order to keep in with Turkey. Bedrossian is still on a quest; perhaps underneath it all lies the same quest as when she was a small girl, to justify her existence and prove that she is loveable. Her ability to pick herself up again, to refashion what has just happened with a sardonic comment, keeps pushing her forward. At the end of the play she describes herself as someone who is at peace with her own mistakes. We can choose to believe that or not.

Finborough Theatre, until 9 July

Image: Tara Marricdale

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