‘Dodi & Diana’ Review: Two Relationships, Linked in the Stars

In an expensive hotel room touched with old-fashioned elegance, a husband and wife growing ever antsier in each other’s company keep the floor-length drapes drawn against the City of Light. It is the tail end of August 2022, they are New Yorkers spending just three days in Paris, but the astrologer who prescribed the trip has ordered them to remain inside.

“Stay in the room with the curtains shut until Jupiter completes its transit,” he told them. “No communication with the outside world. No email. No phones. No TV.”

Jason, an investment banker with a disciple’s faith in his planetary adviser, is anxiously eager to follow the instructions, though he makes an exception for chatting up the bellhop, who he’s hoping will bring him some drugs. Samira, Jason’s actor wife, is semi-willing to obey the rules, but not to the extent of ignoring her phone, which she uses on the sly, trading messages with her rep about a career-changing new screen role.

She is understandably skeptical of the notion that she and Jason are “the astrological doubles of Diana Spencer and Dodi Fayed” — though that is apparently why they have been sent to the Ritz Paris, where they are awaiting a convergence in the 72 hours before the 25th anniversary of the Paris car crash that killed the Princess of Wales and her boyfriend, the son of the hotel’s owner.

In “Dodi & Diana,” Kareem Fahmy’s new two-hander at Here, car crash is the rather crass operative metaphor — as in, Samira and Jason’s relationship of seven years is headed for a smashup. From the start, it’s evident that something is badly wrong with the would-be intimacy between them, and it becomes increasingly clear that they have very different dreams.

For one thing, Jason (Peter Mark Kendall) wants loads of babies, and Samira (Rosaline Elbay) wants to keep building toward stardom while she’s still young enough to get the gigs. Already she’s reached the stage where she’s a little bit famous, and recently she and Jason endured an excruciating episode with the tabloids — a private horror involving him that made lurid headlines only because of her nascent celebrity.

“The more famous you get,” he says, “the more our lives become a minefield.”

Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt for her company, Colt Coeur, “Dodi & Diana” is a sort of pre-mortem of a relationship — a much longer romance than the princess and Fayed enjoyed, yet with assorted elements in common: not just fame and wealth, seductive even at sub-stratospheric levels, but also race, bigotry and otherness. Fayed was born in Alexandria, Egypt; Samira in the United States, to Egyptian immigrant parents. She and Jason, who is white and Canadian, never have found a comfortable, trusting way to live with their racial and cultural differences.

As characters, Diana and Dodi exist for most of the play in voice-over, between scenes, when lighting (by Eric Norbury) and sound design (by Hidenori Nakajo) evoke their visit to Paris in August 1997: the pop of flashbulbs, the sweep of headlights, the roar of engines going too fast.

Eventually, Diana (Elbay) and Dodi (Kendall) materialize — glamorously, aside from a jarring clip in her hair — in the hotel room. (The set is by Alexander Woodward, the costumes by Dina El-Aziz.) It’s the high point of the play, partly because of a question that the persecuted Dodi asks Diana — about the paparazzi, or the British people, or both: “Do you intend to defend me to them?” Shades of Sussexes to come.

Any parallel between the play’s two couples is forced, though. One relationship is intrinsically compelling, even in this imagined version of it, while the other has too little heft to hold our interest. Whether Samira and Jason stay together is a question without urgency.

So the car-crash metaphor feels unseemly — borrowed from the horrific deaths of real people, but for what?

Dodi & Diana
Through Oct. 29 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.