‘I don’t blame Bond for ruining my career’: Meriem Dabo plays a stage-thief writer – and a sniper cellist in 007 | platform

SPanish Oranges, Alba Arekha’s twisty drama about artistic creativity and the price of fame in married life, begins with a prickly confrontation between a famous writer and the journalist interviewing her. The novelist, Fiona, is disturbed when the recording begins, and balks when he questions whether her novel is autobiographical. She squirms and pauses until he ends up asking questions with his back turned, to make it less serious.

Things were not going well in our video call when Arikha called from Paris. Accompanying her on screen is actress Maryam Dabo, who plays the lead role in the play in London. Is Dabo, like Fiona, deeply suspicious of journalists? “Of course,” she says in a friendly tone. Maybe I should turn my back while we talk. Or at least “some” journalists, she adds diplomatically, referring to her formative experience as a “Bond girl.” At the age of 26, she played Kara Milovy, a Czech cellist and would-be sniper who often falls under the spell of Timothy Dalton’s 007 in The Living Daylights.

“I had never done so much journalism,” she recalls. “And in those days, there were Fleet Street journalists who were more harsh and judgmental. You open your heart because you’re inexperienced – and then it gets edited until you think, ‘That’s not what I meant.’

I mostly liked the Bond experience. “It was like a big family,” she says, with producers Kobe and Barbara Broccoli in attendance. But she lived in fear of being exposed one way or another in the aftermath. “I take responsibility for not being confident enough,” she explains. “I was very shy. I was not a child actor. But I don’t blame Bond for ruining my career. I will never regret it.”

D’Abo, a producer and actress, made a 2002 documentary called Bond Girls Forever, in which she spoke to women about their experiences in the 007 films. “My show was Judi Dench. I said there was no story without her, because she became the boss of James Bond. I wanted to show how these roles evolved and how they reflected society – how she went from the 1960s and villains like Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, where there was a lot of satirical humour, to the 1970s where Maude was Adams is treated poorly. It may be unimaginable now but there is this scene in The Man With the Golden Gun When Roger Moore Slaps Her in the Face As the decades passed, women in films became more empowered.

The only thing Dabo would have changed, in hindsight, is her decision to remain in Los Angeles, when she could have established a theatrical career in France. She is English but spent some of her childhood in Paris, and speaks French as her first language. One of the connections I found is with Arikha, a friend of many decades who was born and raised in Paris.

Arikha is well known as a novelist. Her first foray into professional playwriting was inspired by Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Scenes from a Marriage by Ingmar Bergman. “I love writing about families broken up by complications and all that goes unsaid. I love the idea of ​​dissecting a couple but also the imbalance between one of them, the writer who is on the verge of fame, and her husband who is about to drown. So the seesaw of emotions and truth and fame and success is a mixture of all of that.”

In the play, Fiona writes a book using someone else’s story. Is this theft or legitimate collection of materials? Her husband, actor Evo, was recently called off after accusations of violence against a woman. Is this fabricated or real? The play also asks what it takes in family life to be an artist, especially for mothers.

Arikha grew up in an inclusive artistic environment, and you get the impression that she has thought deeply about these questions in an artistic endeavor. She is the daughter of Romanian artist Avigdor Arija and American poet Anne Atik. Samuel Beckett was her godfather and she sent him the poems and plays she wrote. She loves to mix reality and fantasy in art, and she mixes them in her books. “I think life inevitably comes in the imagination, sometimes unconsciously.” When she wrote her memoir, Major/Junior, her sister said: “This never happened.” “I said, ‘It’s my truth,’ and she said, ‘No, it’s not. It didn’t happen.” So what’s the truth? There are some real-life parallels in the production of Spanish Oranges. Ariana Branca, Arija’s 23-year-old daughter, plays the daughter of the fictional couple.

Both Dabo and Arekha know what it means to marry fellow artists: the former to the late director Hugh Hudson, the latter to composer Tom Smile. Neither spoke about the experience of the play’s highly charged artistic rivalry. Does Arikha draw boundaries about what should be taken or excluded from real life based on morality or privacy? Yes, for her novel Two Hours, which was an abridged version of A Very Difficult Moment in My Life.

In addition to dissecting Fiona and Ivo’s marriage, Arikha raises several biblical puzzles about the politics of appropriation and identity. Both women are strongly against the idea of ​​writing or acting solely from personal experience. “I remember Hugh had this amazing project and Ed Harris was going to play this gay character,” says Dabo. “Potential financiers said, ‘You have to get a gay actor.’ It was killing the whole artistic process for the actor and writer.

Some people might say that this is a valid criticism based on acting and authenticity. “Of course, there has to be a healthy balance, but it’s also about allowing the creators to be free to bring what’s right for that specific story and character,” says Dabo.

Arikha agrees. “Without our imagination, what are we supposed to write about? As long as it is done accurately and sympathetically. Think of Tolstoy. How would he have written War and Peace? You have to use your imagination. You have to try to feel what it would be like to be someone else – or somewhere else.”