The British Ambassador's Belly Dancer

Who is Nadira Murray? This is a review of a stage play in London from The Guardian Unlimited: Over at the Arcola, in east London, Nadira Murray is sinuous enough to have escaped from La Cage aux Folles. In Doc Martens, silvery bra, spangled gloves and long veil, she's a disconcerting mixture of the harsh and the insinuating. She's The British Ambassador's Belly Dancer, the woman for whom Craig Murray, the courageous diplomat who exposed the routine practice of torture in Uzbekistan, left his family. She describes herself as bimboed by the British press, written off as a lap-dancer when she has a degree in English, speaks five languages and was a teenage chess champion. But you don't see much chess on stage. Her story, scripted by the actor with Murray and Alan Hescott, is delivered, mostly seated, on an almost bare stage: red sand is spread around a chequered floor; a teapot and dishes stand on a small carved table. It's a catalogue of suffering, titillation, bravery and hard-headed opportunism. Her father was an actor who, falling into poverty, took first to vodka, then to heroin, and became a pusher, using his children as mules (she ferried the stuff in her knickers). Nadira, briefly a teacher after graduating, rescued the family from penury by working as a hostess in a club: Murray ('Who is this old foreigner?' she wondered) fell for her there. She discovered that 'spanking was his real weakness': she was used to being beaten but not to being spanked. He bargained with her father for her hand. She was, she explains, 'sold into freedom', where she seems to have bemused David Hare in her kitchen: 'Do you have mistress?' 'No. My wife is Nicole Farhi.' She's a subtle dancer who ripples like water under wind and isolates body parts you scarcely knew existed. But as an actor she falters. She can mimic the nightclub hostess who, in a 'voice that could open an oyster', told the 20-year-old to get her breasts out. But she's all dropped head and semi-closed eyes when inviting compassion. It's an evening of queasy fascination but no belly-flop. ********************************************************************************** A sort of "teaser" expose' from The Daily Mail gives background information on Nadira Alieva.