‘I need to feel that emotion’
Dubai felt empowering for the single mother—she bought her own home. Her children are now studying abroad, and slowly the path to theatre became clearer. “One day, I was sitting with friends, and two of them had bucket lists. They wanted to win Oscars. So, they asked me to write something.”
And she wrote a play for Dubai’s Short N Sweet, where everyone played a character that was completely contradictory to their real personalities. “I had so much fun, and we never expected anything to happen. But purely on energy and not on talent, we made it to the semi-finals,” she says, laughing.
The excitement around Dubai’s theatre scene was electric. Pinto joined Dubai Junction’s director program and soon staged her own plays, each distinct from the other. One, performed at the Al Quoz Festival, explored the tense dynamics of a husband and wife; another was a witty, intimate story of two people discovering more about each other after a single night together. And now comes The Unfriend, which had Pinto laughing out loud while reading the script.
The thread tying all the productions together: A sense of conviction. “Make me laugh, or make me cry, but I need to feel strong emotions,” says Pinto. And trust — between actors, and between the actors and director — is crucial, especially when someone forgets a line or needs support on stage. Pinto feels fortunate to have cast that energy every single time.
After speaking to the different members of the cast, you see what she means. From learnings and un-learnings, musical way of learning lines, to breathing artistry for as long as they’ve known, the members show just a hint of what lies within Dubai’s pulsing theatre community.
Dubai, theatre and a sense of family
With a querulous air of dramatics, she says, “He’s been murdered!”
It’s clear: Brittany Wood enjoys her role as the questionable guest Elsa, a little too much. Watching her tug at your mind, pressing all the right buttons, is a delight — and it makes Kat Kinsella’s performance as Debbie Lindel, teetering on the edge of frantic desperation, all the more believable. Wood, who hails from the US and ‘all over the place’, as she says, has been in the UAE since 2021. She is no novice to theatre; she has acted in professional productions back home in the US. “That’s where, I made lifelong friends. So, it’s great to be a part of something similar.”
Elaborating further, “There’s just something, in you, when you’re playing a character. You have to be comfortable with other people that you’re taking the stage with. So, it makes it a lot easier to build that community. Whereas, if I was just going to work and coming home every day, I would never see these people or developed a friendship with them. So, it’s a way of broadening family here. I don’t have anyone here, and hear about different things here.”
You have conversations about people on the side, that first initial read-through, where you get to know about each other, you keep developing a bond through the rehearsal process, as she says.