Theatre and the refugee crisis: Part 3, community

I am currently taking part in a program at the Roundhouse for 16-25 year olds, called ‘Making Political Theatre’. One of the ideas that came up in a workshop was this: do we have the right to tell anybody else’s story except our own? The women who ‘authored’ (hard ‘t’) ‘Queens of Syria’ combated this issues by folding their narratives into the framework of Euripides’ text. By sharing their stories collectively, they also share the agency and the piece becomes communal.

The role of theatre in the community is perhaps best exemplified by the Good Chance Theatre project, a pop-up performance space set up by two British playwrights in the Calais Jungle. Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson visited the camp initially to gage how best to help the situations of those living in the camp, half-heartedly wearing their dramatists’ hats. They decided against making a play from their contact with the refugees and were drawn instead to resolving the lack of shared public space within the camp. There was no town hall where people could meet, no space for channeling individual experience towards a collective end. ‘The Joes’ returned to the UK to seek advise from figures like Vicky Featherstone, Artistic Director of the Royal Court. Featherstone recognized the vision of a theatre as a place of sharing stories, hearing voices, physically coming together and humanizing. While the Royal Court proceeded with a curated season of plays dealing with themes of refugee and escape, the Joes went back to Calais with a large white tent, a hat full of money and a group of volunteers.

The premise of the Good Chance theatre is simple. The space belonged to the people of the camp, not to the instigators of the project. The tent provided shelter and a platform in which individuals could gain confidence through performance and find expression. Hope was encouraged and every Saturday saw a ‘Hope Show’, a variety production featuring some rehearsed and some spontaneous pieces. The effect of the project is harder to summarize. People moved their houses to be close to the theatre. They assumed roles of responsibility connected to the well fare and up-keep of the tent, embracing the theatre as a part of their identity. The Joes found that the word ‘refugee’ was no longer appropriate outside the refugee/migrant binary commonly accepted in the UK. Those connected with the theatre became ‘Friends’; as for the women of ‘Queens of Syria’, the term ‘refugee’ was personal and problematic. These were displaced people, with stories of hope to share in addition to those of suffering.

The Good Chance theatre was deconstructed with the camp in 2016, and along with it, the common ground it had given to those who became involved in its shows, courses and activities. Featherstone wrote of the lack of space in British theatre for individual stories that do not make it through the media’s lens. What is the next stage, once the big white tent is gone?

Theatre and the refugee crisis: Part 2, language

‘Queens of Syria’, an adaptation of Euripides’ anti-war play ‘The Trojan Women’, which gives voice to 13 female Syrian refugees, takes this concept of mixing old with new a step further. The initial production was developed in Amman, Jordan, through a series of workshops led by Syrian director Omar Abusaada, in which women re-enacted leaving their country and homes. Subsequently, Developing Artists became involved and the process to bring the production on tour to the UK began, under the direction of Zoe Lafferty. The play ran at the Young Vic, received funding from the British Council and included an education program for UK schools.

The project presents a paradox. On one level, it is the bedrock issues of human empathy and suffering that unite these dislocated women with the Euripides’ Trojan characters and the women of Melos, on whose experience of brutal colonization the ancient playwright was commenting. The cast bring their own stories to the play – the memory of watering a garden, the sense of pride from owning a business – reminding British audiences that their lives were the same, before the civil war removed that all sense of normality.

One the other, this production relies on a linguistic common ground. It is not dance, it is scripted; the women speak in English to the audience and sing in Arabic. They are not presenting ambiguity, they are giving an account. Language, therefore, is as important as the pathos that transcends translation. Lafferty speaks fluent Arabic and had worked in Syria and the Middle East before embarking on ‘Queens of Syria’, while several of the women in the cast also spoke English. The process of construing an unimaginable experience to an English-speaking audience, however willing to understand, was also aided by the legibility of the dramatic form. The popularity and influence of the ancient tragic structure in British theatre tradition offers the women’s suffering form. As Reem, one of the younger women in the group, commented:

“Now I understand why this is important. Here theatre is seen as ‘high art’. If you want people to understand you, you have to speak their language.”[1]

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/4f6e3a0c-4948-11e6-b387-64ab0a67014c

Theatre and the refugee crisis: Part 1

Where do we go to find a play for our times: backwards or forwards?

Last year, the British Council made a podcast discussing the role of British theatre in ‘the largest international migration of people and the worst refugee crisis since World War II’.[1] With President Trump’s recent executive order suspending the entry of all refugees to the U.S. for 120 days and the dismissal of the acting Attorney General Sally Yates, the need for art to refract current affairs back to their instigators is at once extremely pressing and immediately irrelevant. Events are happening so fast, universal truths seem the safest bet and yet returning to the (majoritively male, predominately white) cannon of Western literature in part reinforces the problem that not everybody’s voice is being heard.

In an article for the TLS, Rhodri Lewis suggests we look to the Bard, arguing that ‘when trying to make sense of a world in which someone like Trump can run for and win the US presidency, there are few better companions than Shakespeare’.[2] Lewis focuses on the similarities between Shakespeare’s Rome in Julius Caesar and present-day America: an isolated elite political class, a restless republic, and a ‘showman opportunist’ with the rhetoric to rouse the populous.

Turning to the Complete Works is not unprecedented in times of political strife. The ‘Robben Island Bible’ famously features the marginal of Nelson Mandela, who found comfort in the self-contained, end-stopped idealism of Caesar himself on the eve of his murder in the senate:

‘Cowards die many times before their deaths.

The valiant taste death but once.’[3]

Unlike Shakespeare’s other oligarchical plays – Macbeth, Richard III, King Lear – Julius Caesar does not begin with the king, the aristocrats, the spin-doctors. It begins on the street. Commoners are marching on a working day and the authorities are not happy. What better way to foreground a play about representational leadership than with a vox pop?

‘Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home:/ Is this a holiday?’

Back in 2012, director Phyllida Lloyd chose Julius Caesar as the first in what would become a triptych of plays set in an all-female prison and performed by an all-female cast. The Trilogy, which has now transferred to New York following a four-month run at the Donmar Warehouse, began as a conversation between Lloyd and actress Harriet Walter, who plays Brutus. The aim was ‘to put women into the very male arena of war and politics’, highlighting the gender disparity and power dynamics in three of Shakespeare’s most popular dramas. The setting of the plays grew from an analogy made by the writer Robert Harris, who compared Caesar’s Rome to a prison, in which the freedom of citizens to move, to own property, to speak was circumscribed. ‘Take the most voiceless group you might imagine – women prisoners,’ said Lloyd. ‘Refugees from our culture if you like – people without access to the internet even – and watch them electrify an audience with nothing but Shakespeare’s language.’[4]

The productions are striking, the verse immaculate. Yet the strongest moments are those that reach through the text to touch upon the elaborate backstories created by Lloyd’s company to justify the use of the prison premise. Before each play begins, an actor steps forward and introduces herself, describing her crime and sentence, and explaining why she decided to become involved in the project. These characters then go on to play significant parts in the subsequent drama. Actress Clare Dunne’s part, Rose, suffered from drug addiction but is now clean and will shortly be leaving the prison. Moments later, Rose snorts white powder of nursery furniture as wayward Prince Hal, under the approving eye of Sophie Stanton’s Falstaff. This relationship of dependence deepens, until, in an amalgamation of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Hal disowns his dealer and ascends to his father’s throne – ‘I know you not, old man’.

Suddenly, Falstaff breaks character, shouting at Rose that she ‘won’t survive on the outside’ and begging her not to go. Stanton is swiftly and violently removed by prison guards and the performance ends there, with a spooked Rose still wearing King Henry’s crown.

So is it really Shakespeare who gives these women voice? Take a look at the postcards out in Environmental Designer Bunny Christie’s faceless foyer and you will find an invitation to ‘interactive opportunity…to hear more from the actor’s prison characters’, accessible through an app developed by the company, Clean Break and the York St. John University Prison Partnership Project. Walter is a patron of Clean Break and her own ‘prison character’, Hannah, appears at the end of The Tempest in a cinematic (slightly trite) moment when the voices of her fellow prisoners thank her for initiating the project. ‘Hannah’ is based on a woman called Judith Clark, a political prisoner currently serving a 75-year sentence in the U.S. for extreme non-cooperation. Walter’s book, Brutus and other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare’s Roles for Women, reveals that the actress also drew inspiration from Barack Obama, ‘a morally intelligent leader’ who occasionally acts according to best intentions rather than political nonce.[5]

[1] https://theatreanddance.britishcouncil.org/blog/2016/07/podcast-what-is-the-role-of-theatre-in-the-refugee-crisis/

[2] http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/julius-caesar-richard-shakespeare-trump/?CMP=Spklr-_-Editorial-_-TWITTER-_-TheTLS-_-20170129-_-791900756

[3] http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/06/world/the-smuggled-shakespeare-book/

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/may/25/donmar-warehouse-temporary-theatre-shakespeare-trilogy-kings-cross-station

[5] Brutus and other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare’s Roles for Women by Harriet Walter, (London: Nick Hern Books, 2016).