After Assad

Mount Cassius, seen from Antakya in Turkey. On the other side is Syria.

This afternoon, Ireland added itself to the list of European countries to suspend the processing of asylum applications by refugees from Syria. Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK had already done something similar.  It is, of course, very convenient in terms of right-wing domestic narratives about defending European identities and stopping the boats. It also plays very readily into the standard Western mythological narrative of the individual hero (or villain). When will we learn? "Get rid of the bad guy" we always say "and the problem is solved." It's truly extraordinary that, only a couple of days after Assad's fall, European countries should be taking actions that imply Syria's problems are over.

Of course, there are many Syrian people who desperately want this to be true. Many of the Syrian friends we worked with in Turkey to create SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA have been expressing relief, joy, and a deep desire to return to what remains their beloved home, in spite of the devastation wrought upon it. Some Syrians have begun the journey: and of course the actions of European governments can only encourage this. But there are also a great many people travelling in the opposite direction: people who, in one way or another, may have worked for the Assad government, or who may fear that others will think they did. Just because the dictator has fallen, it doesn't mean there is going to be a free and peaceful, benign and gentle regime established in his place. Look at what happened after Gaddafi's fall. Or Saddam Hussein's. Or Louis XVI's. A revolution, including one that overthrows a tyrant, leaves a void, and a void becomes a contested space that may be filled in many ways.

Those same European governments who have suspended asylum claims are also rapidly considering whether to remove HTS (the insurgent organisation that brought down the regime) from the list of terrorist organisations. It would suit their agenda to do so. However, HTS is an Islamist organisation that emerged from IS and Al-Qaida. Since 2017, they have held sway in Idlib, which was the last stronghold of IS - a place to which none of the refugees I have met expressed any desire to return. It is true that the HTS leader, known in Idlib as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has reverted to his birth name Ahmed al-Sharaa, and is taking some pains to paint the country's future as egalitarian and democratic (whatever that may mean - the Suppliants ask). But his history does not suggest the sort of leader Western powers like to see in the Middle East. From 2003-6 he was a jihadist combatant in Iraq, and spent time under American incarceration, including in Abu Ghraib. After 2011, he returned to Syria to fight for IS. On his triumphant arrival in Damascus, he spoke of it as “a victory for the Islamic nation”. “I left this land over 20 years ago, and my heart longed for this moment,” he said. “Sit quietly my brothers and remember God almighty.”

They might also want to remember President Erdogan of Turkey. HTS has a complex relationship with the Northern neighbour who houses so many of their compatriots, but there is no doubt that it was their uneasy alliance which allowed HTS to hold sway in Idlib for the last seven years. Turkey wants a Syrian regime that is hostile to the Kurds, and an excuse to reduce its enormous refugee population. As so often, Erdogan lines up uneasily beside the Europeans. 

Those last seven years in the micro-state around Idlib offer the best indication of how HTS may try to rule Syria (in so far as there is even a state left to rule). The basic services of government were supplied, and taxes were levied to pay for them. They also imposed deeply conservative rules, particularly on women, and dealt brutally with any opposition. Informed sources are suggesting we may see something close to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Turkey has increased its attacks on the Kurds, who are deprived of their uneasy alliance with Assad, and Israel has been advancing from the Occupied Golan, intent on taking Syrian military bases so as to avoid their coming under Islamist control.

Is this really the moment to suspend all asylum claims from Syrian refugees? 

From Zoukak Theatre in Beirut

 In 2013, Border Crossings worked with Zoukak Theatre in the Lebanese capital Beirut as part of our development process for This Flesh is Mine. This post is their letter to international friends and fellow artists in the face of the Israeli invasion of their lands.

Zoukak Theatre

These are terrible days in our contemporary history. Decades of efforts to create laws, conventions, and agreements that uphold common human values and unite us as citizens of the world are being systematically trampled upon, violently disregarded, and dismantled by a monstrous machine of death, destruction, and dehumanization, reducing entire regions in Palestine and Lebanon to rubble—all under the pretext of Israel’s right to defend itself.

As we write these lines, surrounded by the sounds of drones, military aircraft, missiles, bombings, and the looming threat of embargoes and settler occupation in our country, we wonder how many more wars can we survive? What can be said and done today in the face of such horror? What can we, as artists who already operate on the margins of society, do to make any difference in the course of history? It might sound naïve, but we do know what to do. While a massacre is taking place in the street behind us, art can confront injustice, maintain connectedness, and reinforce a sense of shared existence. We know that individual efforts can influence public debate and rebuild values that bring about a potential for global change. 

Since our inception in 2006—during another brutal Israeli war on Lebanon—Zoukak has remained committed to working under difficult circumstances, both locally and internationally. Now, in 2024, eighteen years later, we find history tragically repeating itself, though on an even larger scale. We are witnessing an unprecedented level of armed aggression by Israel, compounded by the use of advanced military technologies, including artificial intelligence, cyber warfare systems, and internationally prohibited weapons.

A few days ago, we decided to cancel our biennial festival, Zoukak Sidewalks, which was a special edition this year, marking Zoukak’s 18th anniversary. We had considered it a milestone—a step into adulthood in terms of both responsibility and freedom. Responsibility, in the sense of our ongoing commitment to engage with society through art, and freedom as the ability to question, challenge, and continuously recreate the world around us through the active power of imagination.

The ongoing brutal Israeli war on Lebanon has forced us to halt our efforts to sustain this vital cultural encounter. We were looking forward to welcoming you - our international and local colleagues and audience members - and sharing reflections on this significant moment as part of our nearly decade-long tradition in Beirut. While circumstances have forced us to pause, we remain steadfast in our commitment to continue creating. Today, in the face of death and destruction, there is power in our gathering - to create art as an act of resistance and to support relief initiatives and the basic needs of those most affected by the attacks. As we stand on the edge, the act of listening becomes vital. It is through deep listening that we can shape practices toward togetherness and justice.

In this historic moment, we call on the international cultural and artistic community to stand united against colonialist atrocities, funded and co-produced by governmental and taxpayer money in the “West.” We urge you to raise your voice about the current situation, which has reached an irreversible point: daily massacres, widespread displacement, and the extensive destruction of civilian areas, all met with disturbing international complacency. This is not only about our own survival but about the future of human consciousness. We call upon your solidarity during these dark times for Lebanon, Palestine, and the world. 

We grieve our losses daily, even as we know the time for true mourning has not yet come—one that promises to be long and difficult, if we ever get the chance to mourn. Now, the urgent task is to stop this monstrosity!

Watching a young girl in Gaza carry her injured little sister on her shoulders, walking barefoot for two kilometers to give her a chance to live, we can’t help but find within ourselves that same strength to move forward. 

We await the day when we can share artistic work in the theatre again. Until then, we hope those living and witnessing this atrocity—whether up close or from afar—are able to stay safe and maintain their sanity.

Zoukak Theatre

The Question of Language

 

First Quechua Lexicon, 1560
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A few days ago there was a (positively) provocative exchange on our Instagram page, asking why our posts and other communications about THE MOUTH OF THE GODS were in English. The comment read: "No tiene sentido qué hablen de herencia latina, hablen de "descolonizar" y "festejen" el día de la invasión y pongan todos los nombres en inglés"; which translates "It makes no sense to talk about Latin heritage, talk about "decolonizing" and "commemorating" the day of the invasion and put all the names in English."

I take the point. English - the language of globalisation and conquest - doesn't seem to be the ideal medium in which to express anti-colonial sentiments. On the other hand, neither does Spanish, the language in which the comment was made! It may well be true that Spanish is the language through which London's Latin American communities communicate with one another, and so the marker of their difference in our local context - but it is every bit as much the language of colonial rule as English. If we're really going fully to "de-colonise" communication, then the languages we have to turn to are the Indigenous ones. But, while there certainly are speakers and learners of Quechua and Aymara in this city, the use of these languages in publicity would exclude all but a very small number of people. The purpose of Instagram posts is not to be our artistic statement in themselves, but to attract people to the performance, where the fuller statement is made.  I hope this performance will offer a much fuller and richer reflection on the language issue.

We are very aware of the complex questions surrounding Indigenous languages in relation to colonisation.  As Franz Fanon argued, someone "who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language" - so the maintenance and promotion of Indigenous languages is essential to the preservation and resurgence of Indigenous cultures, with their distinct and hugely helpful ways of thinking in relation to community, spirituality and environment. This is why the UN has decided to designate a Decade of Indigenous Languages, of which our work is a part. In his hugely important book about writing and theatre-making in post-colonial spaces De-colonising the Mind, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o makes a powerful case for the avoidance of English (and other imperial languages) on the grounds that they exclude those who are already marginalised in post-colonial societies by a lack of educational opportunities. He is, of course, entirely right. 

In performance THE MOUTH OF THE GODS will actually represent a complex engagement with these very questions. There will be some use of English, in the spoken scenes performed by actors, but these will be deliberately distanced from the audience by their framing through the observation of an Indigenous community, offering a Brechtian estrangement from the language we tend to assume is "normal". The power and dominance of English will be deliberately distanced and questioned. There will be some Spanish, probably spoken and certainly in some of the sung texts from the Codex Martínez Compañón; but the dramatic context will not allow Spanish its cultural dominance either. "O dolce Jesú mio" feels much less Catholic when used to mourn an Indigenous leader executed with the endorsement of the Church. 

The final sections of the show are entirely in Indigenous language. The powerful aria Hanaq Pachap Kusikuynin, written in  Quechua, leads us towards the short opera San Francisco Xavier, which is in Chiquitano. The title is its only element in Spanish, and the only overt reference to the Jesuit order on whose missions it was originally created. Otherwise, the anonymous 18th century Indigenous writer used Chiquitano words for "god", "heaven" and so on: words which were in use long before colonisation, and so liberate the music from the Catholicising constraints of imperial evangelism. My hope is that the piece will move closer and closer to an assertion of Indigenous cultures and their value. It's just that you have to cut through the accretions of colonial language and dominance in order to get there. 

Premier in Adana - Radical Empathy

From Suppliants of Syria

Lucy and I went back to Turkey last week, for the premier of the film version of Suppliants of Syria.  The film is feeling like an ever more important part of this project, not least because of the huge challenges of raising the funds to perform the play in the region where it's set. I'm determined that we will get it to Adana, where we can share it with the Syrian women who took part, but that goal is still a long way off, and in the meantime we owed it to them to impart some sense of how we've been responding to their offer and their work.

It had been some time since I'd looked at the film, so I was able to be more objective about it than is usual when my work first goes in front of audiences.  I'm pleased to say that I was very moved by it - the women's sharing of personal stories, intercut with the Choruses from the Greek play Suppliants, is really searing in its honesty. Their acting, the cinematography and the music feel so rooted in that experience that it's impossible to resist its emotional force. And it's very exciting to have that put into dialogue with more political and structural considerations - there's a very theatrical, I guess Brechtian, interplay between the emotional truths and the objective frames around them.

Which said, my own emotional response pales into insignificance beside the reaction of the women themselves. In the Q&A that followed the screening, one of them, Iman, said that the film was "an incredible achievement - but I have been crying all the way through." I had thought that this was rhetorical, but Lucy, who was sitting amongst them, told me that all of them had been in tears from very early in the film. I suppose there was a lot being re-visited for them all; and there were also new stories they probably did not know, about the personal journeys of their friends who were sitting beside them. There's a moment in the film where some of them share with me that they had never told the stories before. The frame of the creative project was essential to draw out these incredibly important truths.

Another audience member was a Turkish NGO worker, who said that the film would bring out empathy in its audiences, and this was really important for the ongoing refugee work of her organisation.  I found myself responding that what is needed everywhere - not just in Turkey but also in Europe, America and global - is a new radical empathy as the way past the politics of prejudice.  It's very hard to hate somebody when you have heard them tell stories like these.  

In Praise of KAOS

Janet McTeer as Hera in KAOS

The internet has gone wild with fury at Netflix's decision not to commission a second series of KAOS. Actually, most of the protest has been about KAOS being "axed", which isn't really what has happened, as there only was ever one series actually commissioned. But the world of TV, and especially streamed TV, is such that anything that doesn't make it into Series 2 is deemed to have "failed". Commercially, which is the only context in which the language of "success" and "failure" has any meaning, I can only assume that Netflix were right, and that the series hadn't achieved the viewing figures that would make another iteration seem a sound business proposition. The fans who are up in arms don't measure the work's worth by its audience figures, of course - and neither do I. And I loved this series. But, on reflection, I'm actually rather glad that there won't be a second run.

Why? KAOS, to my mind, was a superb drama, and that is not the same thing as soap opera. It was a beautifully crafted, wonderfully insightful and provocative work of art, and as such was self-contained. That makes it astonishingly difficult to repeat. I can't think of any TV series (or film, or play) that has managed it, and of course many "successful" franchises have tried. Netflix's own version of The Handmaid's Tale was a superb adaptation of the novel (with some judicious changes) in its first series, but was left with nothing to adapt in series 2. As a result, it just resorted to more of the same, which is the opposite of dramatic. Gilead carried on being oppressive, Offred carried on being oppressed. So what?

Aurora Perrineau as Riddy

It was precisely because KAOS was such great drama that it resolved itself in an entirely satisfactory way. Again, I'm departing from online orthodoxy here. The prevailing view is that there were lots of loose ends and unresolved plot lines, doubtless deliberately set up by creator Charlie Covell in order to facilitate the longed for series 2. Maybe there was an element of that, but Covell is much too skilled a dramatist to leave their drama hanging in the air, its meaning incomplete. Any drama will leave its audience with the sense that further events might evolve, but that is part of its meaning, not a bid for further attempts to finish. The Handmaid's Tale is a case in point: at the end of the novel Offred is captured, and the reader is left puzzled and disturbed at what may have happened to her, and how the tapes on which she tells her story have survived. But a sequel that answers these questions diminishes, rather than augments, the original work. In Shakespeare's great tragedies, the audience leave thinking about the deaths of Hamlet, Macbeth or Cleopatra, but they also leave imagining what life might be like under the regimes of Fortinbras, Malcolm or Octavian. 

In KAOS, what we are left to imagine is the chaos itself. The whole series, from the moment in Episode 1 when Jeff Goldblum's paranoid Zeus spots a wrinkle, is about the imminence of chaos, a sense that the old order of the gods is about to collapse. Covell's gods are an elision between classical Olympus and today's mega-rich, constantly indulging their appetites at the expense of mere mortals. The threat to their everlasting decadence is that mortals learn of how their deaths (Eurydice descending into a stark black and white Underworld) are not, as their religion suggests, a step towards reincarnation, but an absolute destruction as they are turned into the "Meander water" that feeds the gods and ensures their immortality.

Isn't this exactly what is happening in the world? Aren't we dominated by a few extremely wealthy people whose "success" is built on the oppression of all others, and the destruction of the planet?  Aren't the people who have long been lulled into submission finally working out the mythology of centuries, and moving to overthrow them? We are living in the last generation before the revolution - before the chaos that characterises social and political meltdown, but which is the only way for new structures to emerge.

Misia Butler as Caeneus and Aurora Perrineau as Riddy

It's crucial to KAOS's power as drama of the current moment that its casting embraces "diversity".  Covell's approach, unlike most directors working in mainstream media, is not tokenistic but very carefully considered and central to their work's meaning. Eurydice (Riddy) is a mixed race woman with feminist credentials. Her companion in revealing the reality of the Underworld is Caeneus, a trans man. In each case, and elsewhere, the casting itself illuminates both the original mythology and the way in which it is being used here. The myth of Caeneus has always seemed to me particularly unpleasant and problematic: assigned female at birth, Caeneus was raped by Poseidon, who then granted his wish to be made male so that he would never be raped again. He was, however, murdered by the centaurs as they taunted him over not "really" being male. In KAOS, Caeneus is assigned female at birth in an Amazon community, but is aware from the start of being trans, and is supported by his mother, for whom he waits in the Underworld. His sexual encounter with Riddy is natural and simple, although socially transgressive, and it is this love affair that allows them to understand the reality of the gods, and to begin the process of undermining their power. At the end of the series, Caeneus remains in the Underworld, able to survive beyond the moment when he's supposed to become Meander water, and Riddy is on the surface, carrying her revolutionary knowledge.  

So yes - there could be a series in which they proclaim the truth, get ignored, then persuade, and either triumph or not - but we don't need that.  KAOS, utterly brilliantly, has arrived at exactly the moment in world history for which it was made. We will look back in wonder at its prescience. 

Election Eve

Caught on camera: Noor Alhuda Hajali and Keir Starmer

For anyone who happens to have missed it, tomorrow is Election Day in the UK. It's the culmination of what has been a very predictable and frankly dull campaign, sparked by the Prime Minister's "surprise" announcement six weeks ago: an announcement that seems to have been motivated as much as anything by fatigue. Sunak and the Tories knew that the game was up, and didn't have the energy to carry on. On the radio this morning a Cabinet Minister acknowledged that Labour was about to win a landslide, and in the Telegraph a former Home Secretary fired a starting pistol for the Conservative leadership race that will inevitably follow their defeat. 

"Change" has been Starmer's buzz word throughout the campaign, but it isn't very easy to ascertain precisely what this much-heralded change will actually be. He says he has changed his party, and that much is certainly true. Labour is now a small-c conservative party. Its main priority, he tells us, is the creation of wealth. He has dropped the Green Investment Plan that had seemed to offer some ecological slant to policy. He has back-pedalled on the abolition of University tuition fees. He has also abandoned the entire (Corbynist) manifesto on which he stood to be Labour leader. He has purged the party of dissenting voices, following the example of Boris Johnson's withdrawal of the whip from all Remainer Conservative MPs before the 2019 election. He has supported Israel's genocidal attacks on the Palestinian Territories. He makes "tough" noises about immigration. When asked if he was a socialist, he replied that he was one because he "always puts the country first and party second." I had always thought socialism had something to do with the common ownership of the means of production. So in truth there is remarkably little policy difference between the two main parties in tomorrow's election. Both say they want to "grow the economy" with no acknowledgement of the environmental devastation and global injustice that involves. Both say they will not increase taxes, although at the same time they want to cut NHS waiting lists, recruit more police and more teachers etc.. Both want to "stop the boats". Labour's opposition has not been based on differences in policy but criticism of execution and management. Our "democratic choice" is reduced to whether we prefer corrupt people who line their mates' pockets and turn Downing Street into an illegal drinking den, or a dull and conventional team of management consultants. What they are actually attempting to achieve, however, is identical. And it shows no vision whatsoever.

Of course, in some ways this is reassuring at a moment when politicians who undoubtedly have a vision of sorts, the populist parties of the radical right, are making such headway elsewhere. The European elections were shocking, and the consequences of Emmanuel Macron's petulant response are likely to be even worse. Ireland may also see a snap election, called opportunistically because Sinn Féin has lost popularity over (you've guessed it) immigration. Indian friends have been relieved that Modi and the BJP no longer have an overall majority, but the murderous and deluded messiah of Hindutva remains in power. Never mind what looks almost certain to happen in America in November. 2024 is the year when nearly half the world goes to the polls, but that does not make it a year in which we can celebrate democracy.  It makes it the moment when we have to question if we even have democracy at all.

Anyone visiting us from 5th century Athens would have no doubt on that score. We do not have democracy, we have elections; and elections, the Athenians believed, are the antithesis of democracy. They are oligarchic, or aristocratic. A wealthy "political class" parades itself before the public to be elected, but that public has no real power or participation. In Aeschylus's Suppliants, which offers the frame for our current project SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA, the Chorus of refugees makes the first recorded reference to democracy. As the citizens decide whether to admit them, they ask "What is this thing they call democracy?" Within the play, and within Athenian society, it is a process of debate between the citizenry that leads to a jointly agreed policy decision. An humane decision, as it happens. This approach to democracy was genuinely participatory, as well as being intimately linked to theatre, the space where the different arguments could be rehearsed prior to decision-making processes.

It isn't possible simply to reproduce Athenian democracy today, but it is certainly possible to learn from it, and to modify our own tired and broken system accordingly. The Athenian citizenry numbered about 30 to 40,000 - a body that excluded women, children, slaves and foreigners, so they weren't actually "the people" in any egalitarian way. We can be more inclusive, and still work with similar, manageable numbers, which means that on a local level it is possible to reach sound and informed decisions on the basis of full participation. That in turn can allow for more nuanced forms of representation, whereby power is delegated to representatives at national and international assemblies. 

In the coming years, we want to explore this model of civic engagement in our theatrical spaces, recognising the urgent need for democratic regeneration. SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA represents the beginning of this investigation, and will involve a process of exchange between very different people present at the performance, in the context of listening to the voices of others. Given the context of the current elections, it is only right that our first experiment with this approach to theatre engages with the question of migration. Allowing the voices of the refugees themselves into the theatrical space at once overturns the inanities about "smashing the smugglers' business model". If the politicians really wanted to "stop the boats", then they could just allow the refugees to get on planes. We need to change the culture so that it stops being about short-term personal gain and becomes about what is actually just and equitable. This the antithesis of the soundbite, the refutation of easy sloganeering and reductive advertisement. Who knows - it may even help us start to develop a vision for the world we might want to leave to our children.

*

I had better include a disclaimer on this post, though the fact that I have to do this is in itself is evidence of the very problem we are trying to address. When the election was called, for the first time ever, the Charity Commission emailed registered charities (including Border Crossings) to remind them of their "responsibilities when campaigning or engaging in political activity."  They were clear that "Charities have the legal right to campaign so long as doing so furthers the charity’s purposes and is in the best interests of the charity. Charities must also remain independent and must not give their support to a political party." I believe this blog post fits these legal criteria. 

Writing for Theatre - Guest Blog by Brian Woolland

The Black Madonna from Brian Woolland's
DOUBLE TONGUE. Painted by Nisha Walling.

Anyone who writes – in whatever medium – knows all too well that feeling of being stuck. Writers’ Block, Blank Page Syndrome, call it what you will. Sometimes it’s not knowing where to start. Sometimes you’ve got a great idea, but then, after the initial enthusiasm, you’re not sure how to develop it. Sometimes the cop in the head whispering, that because the words on the page (or computer screen) don’t read brilliantly, the idea isn’t worth pursuing. Often it’s a case of not knowing what’s at the heart of what you’re writing. It came as something of a relief to find, when I talked about this with other writers, that even the most successful writers experience the same struggles. 

DOUBLE TONGUE was the first play of mine that Border Crossings commissioned. The discussions we had while I was working on the first draft were immensely helpful because director Michael Walling instinctively knew to ask questions about the play as it developed, rather than to make suggestions. He then organised and gently directed a rehearsed reading of an early and rather clunky draft. I knew it didn’t quite work, but couldn’t put my finger on why. The discussion with Michael and the actors during the preparations and rehearsal for the reading, and with the small, invited audience afterwards, raised further questions which I could address in the rewrites, but crucially they also enabled me to understand something in the play I’d not seen before. Writing is usually a solitary business. The great joy of workshopping a script is that it gives other perspectives in a supportive environment, it enables you to identify the key questions that need addressing, and to bounce ideas around. It’s precisely what I find so invigorating about writing for theatre. When it moves from the page to the studio it’s a collaborative creative process. 

And that is what my colleague, Rib Davis, and I wanted to create when we established Write Theatre: an environment which gives writers support and encouragement, and enables them to experience and actively participate in the development of material, to learn from others and to see their own work brought to life by excellent and very experienced professional actors. We set up Write Theatre in 2013. Our first course ran in November of that year. Our aim was to provide a stimulating, supportive and nurturing environment for people who were interested in writing for theatre. Until the pandemic and lockdowns we ran at least two courses a year. Almost everyone who’s attended has talked about how the Write Theatre experience has left them feeling invigorated and able to find their own way through and past their own writing blocks – as evidenced in the numerous unsolicited testimonials people have sent in.  

What we do on the course

The first weekend of a Write Theatre course takes the form of a series of workshops in which Rib and I lead alternate sessions. People work individually and in pairs, undertaking a wide range of writing exercises to explore elements such as: 

• Generating material and ideas
• Writing effective dialogue
• Finding a voice
• Characterisation and character development
• Narrative, structure and plot
• Visualisation, imagery and setting
• Stagecraft
• Editing and rewriting

There’s then a two week gap in which each participant writes a short scene. In the second weekend Rib and I work with three experienced professional actors to explore these scenes, encouraging and enabling further development. The course ends with short script-in-hand presentations of the re-worked scripts and discussions about how each of them might be developed further.

Many courses about writing for theatre borrow an approach which might work for Hollywood films, but is often inappropriate and unhelpfully constraining for theatre writing. One of the great joys of theatre is that good plays can take many forms. From the start of the first weekend we state clearly that we DON’T offer a rigid, prescriptive formula for how to write plays. We aim to enable participants to USE what we offer to find a process (or processes) that works for them, and will stand them in good stead when working alone.

If you’d like to enrol on our next course at The Cockpit Theatre on the weekends 12th - 13th and 26th - 27th October, please contact us at theatrewriting@gmail.com. Please send us two short paragraphs about yourself.  In the first, please give a brief account of your writing experience to date. In the second, please state what specifically you hope to gain from the course. This information will help us fine tune our planning. We will then respond within two days telling you whether you have been accepted onto the course.

We are offering a 15% discount to anyone signed up in response to this blog or the Border Crossings newsletter. Quote BC24.

The Land Acknowledgement

Cliff Cardinal in THE LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Back in 2017, we brought Cliff Cardinal's HUFF to ORIGINS. That's a year before this five-star review, which the show received for its Edinburgh run, on the day it closed. With Cliff's work it seems you have to be in the know.... His latest piece, THE LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, which opened LIFT at the Southbank on Wednesday, started off in Canada during 2021, under the title William Shakespeare's As You Like It. As Cliff explains in this version of the show, especially (and necessarily) re-worked for London, that was a ruse to get "rich Canadians" into the theatre. The performance begins with a traditional red curtain in place, and Cliff comes through it to begin a "land acknowledgement". This is one of the things he has to explain in a bit more detail for his London audience: in Canada it's common practice for events to begin with an acknowledgement of the Indigenous people on whose land the event is happening. So the original 2021 audience would have thought his speech was just another tokenistic prelude to the main event, which would of course be the Shakespeare production. They got a bit twitchy as it went on rather longer than usual. Eventually it became clear that there wasn't going to be a Shakespeare production. The land acknowledgement is the entire show. 

I wish I'd seen that original version, and been able to observe the ruse in action, and the extraordinary actor-audience dynamic that must have evolved through the evening. In London, the ruse couldn't work in the same way, and so the title has changed and Cliff is honest from the start about what he's doing, telling the story of those original audiences as part of his performance. But here too, the relationship with the audience is deliberately and deeply uncomfortable. There's laughter a-plenty - the format is essentially a stand-up comedy set - but there are also winces, gasps and moments of profound and disturbed silence. At the Brighton Festival, there were walk-outs. After all, as Cliff points out, a Land Acknowledgement is basically an acknowledgement that the land has been stolen. Usually, when someone acknowledges that they have stolen something, they give it back. But here, the acknowledgement alone seems to be considered sufficient. That must have been very telling in Canada, and it hits home in Britain too, albeit in a slightly different way. The oil companies, the banks, the mining companies...  all those head offices that sit in the City and profit from Indigenous land while poverty wreaks havoc on the res.....  

In Australia, the conventions that have evolved are a bit different. The land acknowledgement there is known as a "welcome to country". Elders are asked (and usually paid) to welcome people onto their lands. But, as an Indigenous Australian activist explained to me, this protocol misses out one crucial aspect in the Indigenous tradition of hospitality, which is that the visitors used to request permission to come onto someone else's lands, and that permission had to be granted before any form of welcome was offered. Nowadays, permission is taken for granted and hospitality has been commodified. It's only by performing a land acknowledgement that you can raise the vital questions about their validity. 

Au revoir to Emma

Emma Townsend

Today, we're sorry to be saying "au revoir" to our fabulous Marketing Manager, Emma Townsend. She's been a huge asset to Border Crossings over the last five years, and has really boosted our public profile and our online presence. Who'd have thought we would have punchy videos going viral on Tik-Tok?

Here's a guest post from Emma herself:

After an incredible five-year journey, I'm bidding farewell to my longstanding freelance roles at Border Crossings to embark on my next big adventure—motherhood!

Reflecting on my time with the organisatios fills me with immense gratitude. I've been blessed with opportunities to explore, experiment, and nurture my creativity. Along the way, I've tested ideas, some of which didn't quite hit the mark, but others that truly made a meaningful impact. And it was the supportive, collaborative, and receptive work environment that I came to value immensely and which contributed to my professional growth.

At Border Crossings, I've had the opportunity to amplify voices and stories that truly matter. When I joined in 2019, Michael believed in me enough to throw me into marketing a multi-venue, multidisciplinary Indigenous arts festival across some of London's most significant cultural venues. I obviously did something right because he invited me back again and again, and I was thrilled to work on more wonderful projects... like championing a 5m totem's epic journey from Mexico to a tour across the UK, bearing a vital message from the Indigenous Totonac people during COP26. We got featured on BBC News and caused a stir in towns and villages across the country. And that’s just to name a few of the countless projects that I feel so blessed to have been a part of.

As I step into this new phase, I have a great sense of fulfilment and excitement for what the future holds.

An Enemy of the People

Matt Smith and Jessica Brown Findlay
in "An Enemy of the People"

I was anxious to see Thomas Ostermeier's production of An Enemy of the People for several reasons. For one thing, I've found previous work of his, particularly the Ibsen adaptations, absolutely thrilling. His Hedda Gabler was superb - and I was astonished to discover when I searched this blog for my response that I saw it as long ago as 2008! I still remember very vividly the impassive central performance of Katharina Schüttler (who was also brilliant in Ostermeier's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted), cold as ice and utterly bored - so disillusioned that she seemed never to have known illusion. An Enemy of the People also came to the Barbican, where I'd seen both of those previous shows, in 2014.  I was very sorry to miss it, not least because of the buzz around it from people like Simon McBurney. So when it popped up in the West End a decade later, this time in English with Matt Smith in the lead, I had to book. It was a midweek matinée, and it was ridiculously expensive.

Much of the discourse around the Barbican performances, and other outings for this much-travelled show, centred on the audience debate that happens in the middle of the performance. I was at once keen to experience this and a bit nervous: we are planning an interactive moment of live democracy in our forthcoming Suppliants of Syria. I wanted to see whether Ostermeier's debate worked, and if so how. And I wanted to make sure it wasn't too close to what we're planning: it's never a good idea to lay yourself open to accusations of plagiarism.

I needn't have worried. Disappointingly, the "debate" at the heart of Ostermeier's production isn't really a debate at all. Matt Smith as Dr Stockmann, a star doing a star turn, stands at a lectern after the interval and delivers a very rousing and insightful monologue about the horrors of contemporary capitalism. It's clearly updated as the production ages and grows: for the 2024 West End outing there's a lot about social media, algorithms and online manipulation. Climate change, of course. There's also a lot about grotesque wealth and obscene inequality. It would be pretty difficult to disagree with him. But that is how the production works - Stockmann is quite obviously right, but the bosses and the politicians shut him down anyway. You could, I suppose, say that's also how our world works - but I don't think it's how Ibsen works, and I also don't think it's how theatre works more generally. In Ibsen's original text, there's a lot more nuance: Stockmann's brother Peter does actually have some cogent arguments about social cohesion and the threat to the local economy, all of which become melodramatically transformed into incoherent malice and selfishness in Ostermeier's version. There is a hero and there is a villain.

If we all know who's right and who's wrong, then of course it becomes a bit of a challenge to hold a debate. But the production doesn't really hold a debate at all. Instead Priyanga Burford, the actor "in the chair", asks who agrees with Dr. Stockmann and why. So we get a series of interventions expressing personal experiences or ideas which support the general (by now well-established) point that capitalism sucks. I don't disagree, of course - but it isn't a debate and it isn't dramatic. In fact, it feels closer to an evangelical testimonial session or a right-wing rally than to a democratic forum. And, I'm afraid, it's also blindingly hypocritical. 

So I put my hand up. I get the mic. I agree with what Dr Stockmann had said: of course I do. I agree that theatre should open up and expose our social and political structures. And then I ask, if this production is so deeply opposed to capitalism, why is it so expensive just to be in the room?  

Thunderous applause. Cheers. Laughter. An explosion of joy and anger combined. People all around patting me on the back.

Priyanga Burford tries to deflect it by returning to the fiction. "Oh!" she says, "did you have to pay to come in? We'll have to look into that."  Too right we will.

Sidi Bouzid

Street scene: Regueb, Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia

I've been in Tunisia this week, thanks to an invitation from ATAC (Association Tunisienne de L’Action Culturelle), who initiate cultural actions for human rights in the face of some great challenges! Riadh Abidi and Nouha Hajji, who run the organisation, are incredibly committed to social justice and the role of culture in securing it: so this seemed an ideal place to offer a first preview screening of our SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA film. So far, it's only fully accessible to Arabic-speaking audiences, as that's how far the subtitling process has got - but an Arabic-speaking audience is exactly what we have here, even though we are a long way from Syria and from Adana, at least physically. The cultural links between Syrian refugees and Tunisians are of course very strong, and are being made stronger by the response to the Gaza crisis across the Islamic world. What's more, the question of Fortress Europe is very real here, as in Turkey. On the day we screened the film, Giorgia Meloni was in Tunis for the fourth time this year, having "further discussions" around migration with President Saied. There's already a basic deal in place between Tunisia and the EU, akin to the (much larger) EU-Turkey deal, whereby Tunisia is paid to intercept migrants crossing the Mediterranean. The Tunisian government says it has prevented 21,000 crossings this year alone. Many of these migrants had already crossed the Sahara to get this far: they come from conflict or post-conflict zones like the DRC, Sierra Leone, Northern Nigeria and Senegal. 

But it was not just the section of the film about European exclusion of desperate people that struck a chord here. Sidi Bouzid, the city where we showed the film, was also the place where the Arab Spring began. It's not a very big city - it has fewer than 50,000 inhabitants - and that makes the reach of what happened here all the more extraordinary. On 17th December 2010, a 26 year old street trader called Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the public street, burning to death. His self-immolation was an act of desperate protest against endemic corruption: his goods had been confiscated and he had been publicly humiliated by civic officials after he refused to bribe them. Bouazizi's actions led to a wave of further protests in the city and the surrounding areas, which the people of Sidi Bouzid, with great foresight, recorded on their phones and uploaded to social media. In particular, they recorded the authorities' use of violence against them: there were at least 20 further deaths. The protests spread across the country, and by January 14th 2011, President Ben Ali had been forced to flee the country. Not long after, further revolutionary actions began across the Arab World; including, of course, the outbreak of the ongoing conflicts in Syria.

So the question at the centre of Aeschylus's Suppliants, and of our SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA, seemed incredibly immediate and intense at Wednesday's screening: "What is this thing they call democracy?" As David Wiles points out in the film, democracy is not necessarily compatible with human rights - indeed he suggests there may be a fundamental incompatibility between the two. If, as European and American governments like to suggest, the "representative" systems that they have in place serve to enact the rule of "the people", then what of the rights of other people who are by definition not part of the "rule" in that state? When "the people" rise up to claim their rights, which would seem to be a "democratic" endeavour, why does it so often lead to greater repression or to anarchy? More than a decade on, can any positive meaning be found in the tragic death of Mohamed Bouazizi?

I saw these images on a wall in Regueb, a smaller town in the Govenornate of Sid Bouzid, this morning. I may be wrong, but I think the man portrayed is Mohamed Bouazizi. 

Developing SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA - Guest post by Liam Rees

In the workshop room for SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA

For four weeks, director Michael Walling and three actors (Richard Adetunji, Vlad Gurdis and John Rogers) have been exploring response to The Suppliants by Aeschylus, in which the suppliant women flee forced marriage and seek asylum in Greece, but are met by a seemingly endless debate about the correct course of action. I'd been interested in Border Crossings' approach to devising for some time, and was delighted to join them for a week, acting as a dramaturgical outside eye. Here are some observations from the process.

“Democracy is a conversation.” We can agree on that, can’t we?

The oldest written record of the word “democracy” is in The Suppliants by Aeschylus, and this rehearsal room is obsessed with the idea of democracy. As one actor explains, it comes from the Greek ‘demos’ meaning people, and ‘kratos’ meaning power. So the power of the people. But how is that power expressed? In theatre, it’s through our voice, and there’s a constant back and forth of disagreements, compared experiences, and conflicting perspectives in the room. There’s a cacophony of voices in the rehearsal room: the actors, the director, Aeschylus, and the real life suppliants, a group of Syrian women seeking asylum in Turkey. Like Aeschylus, their words and voices have been recorded and interpreted but they can’t be in the room with us. There will always be some gap in our understanding…

“The worst thing that’s ever happened to you is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”

Each day in rehearsals is different but always centres around trying to understand the plight of the suppliant women. One day is spent exploring the classical text via mask work. It unlocks a more mythic aspect to the text, less reliant on a personal or psychological connection. In a way the mask protects the actor from any traumatic material. The next day we watch interviews with the Syrian women and everything is all too real. We dig into our own experiences and our own points of connection with the suppliants of Syria. There’s no mask to hide behind. These aren’t characters we’re playing. We’re five men trying to make sense of men at war and male violence against women. At one point we ask if we should have more women in the room; but is that then forcing them to take on more emotional labour? Surely men need to take responsibility for sorting the issues they cause? It’s “not all men” but it is almost always a man. There’s no simple answer and at the end of every day we take care to check in with each other and not take the heavy, personal, messy questions home with us. But the questions never go away throughout the process. Michael shares anecdotes about visiting Turkey and the ethical issues inherent in documenting and interviewing asylum seekers. Is this exploitation or genuine dialogue? Does paying them for their time turn suffering into a commodity to be consumed? Is there any “good” way to tell their story?

“It’s great that we’re having this conversation.”

Every day brings new questions and every new question leads to rewrites and reinterpretations of the source material. There’s Aeschylus’ original text, the interviews, and a meta-commentary performed by the actors as fictionalised versions of themselves.  At times it can feel overwhelming. Are there too many questions that we can’t answer? In the heat of one discussion we’re forced to ask what the point of this project is? Are we simply going in circles? If it’s impossible to understand someone else’s experience then what is the point in trying? Is this conversation actually intended to result in action? Or is it a distraction? A means for us to absolve ourselves of feelings of guilt?

There’s a repeated phrase in one section: It’s great that we’re having this conversation. 

Because silence doesn’t feel like an option.

Everything about this show invites disagreement.

For now, there’s still time for the cast and crew to decide what this show should be.

But that conversation can't go on forever, can it?

Liam Rees is a director who specialises in developing new work and new writing. He has a particular interest in international collaboration and enjoys making theatre that uses digital tech to put the internet onstage and facilitate more international conversations.