Plays of Love and War

Why

The project that took us to Palestine was a play called This Flesh is Mine, which Border Crossings produced in collaboration with Ashtar. It had long seemed to me that, as a company dedicated to a theatre of intercultural dialogue, we should engage with the Middle East, but I was unsure how we could begin. When Brian Woolland suggested to me that we might work on a production that approached the politics of the region through the prism of The Iliad, it opened up the possibility of engagement without the pitfalls of simplistic moralising. Mythology allows you to address the present without apportioning blame or picking over historical minutiae. It permits a purer, more emotional identification with the experience of prolonged warfare.

To begin with, we were not specifically thinking of Palestine. Our main development period took place in Beirut, in collaboration with a company there called Zoukak. The workshops we undertook in our own country encompassed refugees from Syria and Iran. Always in our minds were the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq: in the latter part of the play, the search for Helen begins to seem like the quest for Saddam Hussein’s elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction – “a glamorous excuse for war”. We became fascinated with the way in which Achilles’ decision to withdraw from the war might move beyond the personal vendetta over the slave Briseis that is at the heart of The Iliad, and become close to the intense disillusionment felt by so many who are implicated in the conflicts in the region today.

After the Iliad comes the Odyssey. After the tales of war, there come the tales of returning soldiers, of altered homelands, of the long voyages home, the displaced people on the seas.  As the refugee crisis grew in 2015-16, it seemed both obvious and essential that our Homeric Middle East should move into a second phase, an Odyssey that responded to this new turbulence, just as our Iliad had responded to Middle Eastern wars.

Location

Ramallah

Characteristics

How it was done

How

 

Theatre

 

Travel

 

Workshops

 

Food

 

 

 

Results

“The play truly breaks down barriers” – The Guardian

See https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/may/23/this-flesh-is-mine-border-crossing

“A riveting performance of poise and emotion…. theatre of the highest quality” – Counterpunch

See http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/28/when-nobody-returns-palestinians-show-they-are-people-too/

How it went

Main lessons learned

“We’re all in this together, stirring it around, trying to find things out by working together.”

See http://thisfleshismine.blogspot.co.uk

Credits

Writer: Brian Woolland

Director: Michael Walling

Cast: Iman Aoun (Artistic Director, Ashtar Theatre), Razan Al-Azzeh, Emile Andre, David Broughton-Davies, Andrew French, Tariq Jordan, Gerrard McArthur, Bayan Shbib, Jumaan Short.

Designer: Will Hargreaves

Lighting: Nick Moran

Music: Dave Carey

Activity Timeline