Film, liveness, archives

Nyatt School Redux

In the aftermath of our archiving project CHECKPOINT, and recent work like SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA that has blended theatre and film, I've been thinking more about the potential in the relationship between the two art forms. We tend to think of theatre as the live form - less stable, more unpredictable - and film as the finished product that is pretty much the same wherever it goes. But I'm not so sure any more.

Back in April, while the CHECKPOINT project was running, I went to see a performance by the legendary American company The Wooster Group at the Coronet Theatre in West London. It was called NYATT SCHOOL REDUX, and was a reworking of the same company’s famous piece NYATT SCHOOL, originally performed in 1978. Both pieces were directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, and featured Kate Valk. The 1978 play had been co-created by the great Spalding Gray, and the opening scene marked his first foray into the autobiographical monologue form for which he was to become celebrated. What was fascinating for me was the way in which the new play was generated from a dialogue with the old one, featuring archival material which was sometimes re-created and sometimes questioned. At the start of the performance, Kate Valk (50 years older than she was when she appeared in the original work) showed the audience some newly-restored archival videos of Gray’s opening monologue from the original production. In it, Gray described his early work in theatre and played vinyl records from his own archival collection, including an LP of T.S. Eliot’s THE COCKTAIL PARTY, featuring Sir Alec Guinness. 

Somewhere behind Gray’s opening monologue was the memory of his mother’s suicide: Eliot’s play is about the sacrifice of a selfless young woman, and Guinness’s character attempts to make sense of it for the survivors. Somewhere behind the new play, and Valk’s opening monologue which mirrors Gray’s, there is the suicide of Gray himself in 2004. 

The play was incredibly moving. 

All theatre, even the lightest of comedy, is actually on some level about death. That’s because the art form is live, meaning that our experience of it is different from the way we experience a novel, a painting, a film or a poem. The performance exists only in the moment, and then is gone: and this is also true of life itself. The transitory nature of theatre reminds us of our own mortality, and so demands an intensity of attention, an entering into the experience, that transforms that sense of mortality into an embrace of life in its fullness. In the theatre, whether as performer or as audience, you feel very much alive and present.

This could be taken as suggesting that the archiving of performance is an unnecessary, even a futile action, but the Wooster Group’s work demonstrates the contrary. In Spalding Gray’s original monologue, the recorded voice of Alec Guinness served as a trace of a performance that had once been, that could not be experienced again, but that could be archived and remembered. In NYATT SCHOOL REDUX, the grainy black and white video of Gray himself, with its moments of sound loss and its poor focus, made present his very absence. His death was all the more real because of the archiving of his intensely lived performance work. The presentation through performance of that archival material by Kate Valk and Elizabeth LeCompte, now 69 and 82 respectively, was at once an act of mourning and a joyous, comic celebration of life, of theatre, and of the filmic archive.

Suppliants of Syria - Fatima and the actors

SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA was a very different kind of show, but here again the video elements served as stimuli for the live performance, and acquired new energy from the interaction. In one of my favourite moments Fatima, a Syrian woman whom we had interviewed in Turkey, asks a really important question: why do European governments try so hard to stop people fleeing from war, oppression and starvation?  The question was followed by a series of tortuous explanations and silences from the actors, while Fatima's benign presence remained above the stage, exuding a calm wisdom and a profound bafflement. The actors in this piece serve as representatives of the audience, bringing into the public space of theatre the doubts and frustrations so many of us feel around our relationship to the world beyond our borders. In another moment, we used archive footage from the ancient theatre at Palmyra, which ISIS / Daesh used as a place of execution. Here the interaction was with the young actor Tobi, describing his own first experience of theatre, and realising how disturbingly close the thrill of witnessing a performance can be to the horror of public murder. Again, the live performance and the video material interacted in a way that changed the audience's response to each of them, and made something new from the synthesis.

Shab-Nameh

Last week, at the London Film Festival, I saw what was billed as a "live film performance" by the Iranian film-maker Maryam Tafakory. SHAB-NAMEH involved the projection of sequences from archive footage, alongside Tafakory's commentary from the side of the stage. Sometimes she spoke while the film played, sometimes she halted it overtly and deliberately, sometimes a film sequence would end and she would talk for a while in response. Before the event, she had underlined the importance of the moment when many of the texts she spoke were written, and mentioned the date as she got to them. To give just one example, there was a text written on 7th April 2026: the day Trump threatened that "A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will." The text included Tafakory saying that the massacre perpetrated by the Iranian regime in January already seemed very far away. I don't recall her exact words, but they were questioned afterwards by another Iranian woman in the audience, who wanted to emphasise the brutality of the Islamic Republic, and said that the January massacre remained an open wound. Takafory reminded her of the specific timing of the text. She was herself deeply opposed to the regime, and had been horrified by the events in January - but her point was that Trump's threats to the entire Iranian people eclipsed even that. Every other work she had ever made expressed anger against the regime, she explained, but this time it felt necessary to turn her attention elsewhere. 

This isn't something that a "finished" film can do, of course. Once its statement is made, it is unchanging (at least for the author - the way an audience reads it can and does mutate). The introduction of live interaction with filmed material serves to mediate and to contextualise. As soon as film is put into dialogue with theatre, we can see if differently. It becomes a resource, a trace of other lives, a participant in an evolving discourse. At a time when we need to reassert the importance of liveness, this seems a very necessary action. 

Killing Fascists - Sound and Silence

Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists

Last month, I went to see Tiago Rodrigues' extraordinary play Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists at the National Theatre. It was a rare and welcome bit of international programming by the National, even if it was only a week's run in the theatre's smallest space. It felt important that this piece should be seen here. Like most of Europe, indeed most of the world, Britain risks being taken over by the extreme right. Our theatres are being very coy about it.  A wake-up call from Portugal, the European country which had the longest-lasting and most overlooked Fascist dictatorship of them all, felt timely and urgent.

It's a superb piece of work, with many threads running through it. To kill or not to kill. Violence against women and male solidarity with the victims (all the anti-fascist family are called Catrina, all of them wear skirts). Living with the land (a fascist trope turned on its head by the farming family). Critical or journalistic writing has tended to concentrate on the ending, when the kidnapped fascist politician, spared by 26-year old female Catarina's decision not to kill, turns to the audience and delivers a 20-minute monologue packed with right-wing hatred. The UK press concentrated on how, in mainland Europe, that had become the occasion for loud heckling, walk-outs and even a stage invasion. They wrote about this as if those audiences hadn't understood the difference between an actor playing a fascist and a real fascist: and they also expressed a kind of weary disappointment that the same had not happened at the Dorfman. Maybe, they seemed to suggest, this tells us something about the more sophisticated and reserved British theatre audience....

Well maybe. Or maybe it just tells us something about the audience of journalists and theatre management on press night. On the night I went, there was a lot of heckling and booing. Including some heckling in Portuguese. Some people walked out. But none of this was because the audience felt that the play was itself fascistic, or that the actor was a real fascist mouthpiece. Rather, it was because the play demanded that we participate - both theatrically and vocally - and that the passive audience move into a position of performance-making in public space, rather than simply receiving a completed work of art. It was a thrilling expression of liveness.

This understanding has made me think more about the process by which the play brought us to this place, looking at how sound and silence operate within the piece itself, extending from the stage into the entire theatre space and so (hopefully) to the society beyond. As far as I recall, the first voice we hear is the young male Catarina, who speaks directly to the audience - and what he speaks about is silence. Making him a kind of Chorus / Narrator means that we identify with him, watching the other characters through his eyes, hearing them through his ears. But what he tells us is that he has decided to be silent in his life: and for the rest of the play we hear very little from him by way of words. Some commentators have described him as an autistic character, but that misses the point that his silence is elective: he has chosen not to participate directly in the discourses around him. However, he does join in with the lines of Catarina 26 as she tries to deal with her moral dilemma, so drawing us into that process too. What's more, he is wearing headphones, and cues the music ("Musica"), so that the emotional sound world through which we perceive the scenes is also his world. It makes us very aware of our active presence, even as a silent audience, the contradition inherent in the decision to be silent, in political quietude. Decisions are being made that can control the emotional response to the action, and we feel ourselves implicated in those decisions.

There are many short scenes for two or three characters through the two hours that precede the final monologue: but none of those scenes have only those two or three characters on the stage. The picture at the top of this post is from an intense dialectical scene between Catarina 26 and her mother, in which both state their position on political murder, and both are right. But look at the table at Stage Right. Those two other characters are not in the scene - it's a private confrontation between two people. Those others are present as observers, as listeners, as audience. It's a motif that continues throughout. Even the fascist is present and silent from the very start of the play (long before that character is brought to the house by Catarina 26), and during his monologue, the family remains present on the stage. So the act of listening is constantly foregrounded, and the silence of the observer, the silence of the audience, is made inetgral to the play.

That's why the ending tips us into activity, into noise. We cannot remain silent, because silence has been proved inadequate by the very structure of the performance. We cannot remain a passive audience - we have to become actors - both in the sense of performing in the theatre, but also in the sense of becoming politically active. We are forced to acknowledge that we have a role to play in ensuring that the fascist cannot hold the stage.

Marjane Satrapi

 

When Marjane Satrapi died a few weeks ago, I was asked to give an interview about it. I should point out that I didn't know her at all: I guess I was approached for comment because I was known to have done some cultural work involving women in Western Asia. The interview consisted of the journalist sending me written questions, to which I wrote my replies. The published version was made to look like there had been a conversation - a few snippets were quoted. There were comments that suggested I was saying Marjane supported the oppression of women in Iran, when nothing could be further from the truth! So I thought I would like to publish the full piece here.

What was the impact of Marjane Satrapi’s work?

When Persepolis came out, almost a quarter of a century ago now, it was a revelation. In its stark, clear imagery, its direct language and its alternation between episodes of comedy and pathos, this graphic auto-fiction found a completely new way to bring a global readership into direct relationship with this warm, wry and penetratingly intelligent Iranian woman. That overturned a lot of lazy, stereotypical, prejudiced thinking. Europeans and Americans like to construct the woman as victim, and the institutional oppression of women under regimes like the Taliban, Daesh and the Islamic Republic can easily compound that, leading to people talking about Islam as inherently sexist (which it is not), and about Western Asia as a “backward” or “barbaric” place, about people “living in the Middle Ages”. When you hear the voices of women who have lived under those regimes, and recognise their profound commitment to their people, their cultures and their sisters, the sheer depth of their humanity, the articulacy with which they express their ideas - then you start to understand that they are not being oppressed by anything culturally inherent in their societies, but by yet another right-wing patriarchal power grab. 

President Macron said that Marjane Satrapi “turned an Iranian childhood into a universal tale”. On one level that seems nonsensical: her storytelling was very specifically rooted in a set of historical circumstances. But on another level he was kind of right: what she managed to do was to open up the Iranian context so that people who hadn’t experienced it could relate to it emotionally. On a human level.

Why is her loss a tragedy for Iran?

She was way too young to pass away. Only 56. And, as her family said, she died of sadness. Someone who had dealt with sorrow throughout her life had found love and happiness, and when the person she loved passed on, that was more than she could bear. That’s not only a tragedy for just one nation - it’s the tragic nature of humanity exemplified by one of its most beautiful, feeling voices.

Iran is dealing with tragedy on many levels at the moment. The regime that Marjane Satrapi so strongly opposed is still very much in place, and the illegal invasion by Israel and the United States is causing great suffering to the Iranian people. I find it astonishing that even after the Syrian refugee crisis, even after the Gaza genocide, there is still an over-riding narrative that the US and Israel are the good guys, and that they are closer to “us” in terms of values like democracy and freedom. Marjane Satrapi was one of the very rare people who had a platform from which to debunk that. One thing she said in an interview which really resonates with me was when she was asked for a message to the American people, and she emphasised that we should not mentally be dividing the world into countries, into cultures, into East and West. “The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.” The current moment is only showing us how true that is.

What is her legacy and what were her hopes for her country?

Her legacy is her life - not just as it was lived but as it was articulated, as it was drawn, dramatised and communicated. The way she moulded her life into a beautiful offering for the world. And through that, I hope she leaves a legacy of understanding. I hope people will revisit her writing and drawing and film-making now that she has left us, and feel close to her through what she has expressed. That way we can come closer to other Iranians too.

In terms of her hopes for her country - I think the phrase “Woman, Life, Freedom” encapsulates it pretty well. It’s striking that this phrase works so well in English - look at how “woman” and “freedom” half rhyme, echoing one another so that “life” cuts harshly through the centre with that intense individual “I”, like “knife” and “strife”. Last year I was working on a new play with another brilliant female Iranian artist, Sanam Naderi, who lives in Italy.  I asked her to improvise a speech at a political rally, and she did most of it in a fearsome Persian, before suddenly switching to English and declaiming “Woman, Life, Freedom”.  So this phrase is consciously addressed to a global audience, in the same way that the theatre of apartheid South Africa or the Civil Rights movement deliberately sought out international spaces.  The Iranian regime won’t change because of the current illegal aggression, and it’s unlikely to change positively through a further revolution on the ground. What’s needed is a longer-term cultural shift, rooted in a public discourse, and that requires international dialogue.  That’s something only the artists and the storytellers can do. 

In dialogue with researchers

SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA.  Photo: John Cobb

SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA finally had its first performance run last week at Hoxton Hall, and I'm very happy to say it was really well received. Flo London called it "Impactful theatre...  Necessary theatre", while Beyond the Curtain said it was "a stimulating, confronting and eye-opening piece of theatre". But the best piece of writing about the play was actually written before the author had even seen it, and that's Natasha Remoundou-Howley's programme note. "The stage" she writes "becomes a contested space of citizenship and rights: where belonging, inclusion, and diversity are questioned, scrutinized, and rehearsed. This is theatre that demands visibility because the agents of this claim are refugee women performing their inalienable right to exist, to be heard, and to be seen."

I first encountered Natasha's research and critical writing when I was planning the play, I suppose around 2022. I Googled "Suppliants Aeschylus Syria", and a piece she had written in 2017 appeared. It was called The Suppliants of Syria: Narratives of Displacement and Resettlement in Refugee Performances of Greek Tragedy. So that was where our title came from. Some time later I sent Natasha a note via her Academia page, thanking her for the article and explaining what we were up to. Over a year passed, and I thought no more about it, until in September 2025 I got a very apologetic reply: Natasha had somehow missed seeing the message, and was excited to hear more. We met in Dublin, and now she's a board member of our Irish company!

Revisiting that original article today, I realise it's not so preoccupied with Aeschylus' Suppliants as I had thought. The play is discussed, but the main focus of the piece is on some other contemporary pieces of theatre which are based on Greek models, and which involve female Syrian refugees. One of these, Queens of Syria, I saw when it came to London in 2016. I also made use of the film version as part of our workshop for THE PROMISED LAND in 2018, with Zoe Lafferty, who had directed the London staging, coming to talk to our group. Natasha's article recounts how this was largely a platform for testimony, and how its international reach foundered when the US refused artistic visas to the women on the grounds that they were refugees living in Jordan.

That was in 2014. Two years after that, the EU-Turkey deal brought brought about a situation where the vast majority of Syrian refugees cannot travel at all. I came to understand the background and details of this cruel policy through a dialogue with another academic friend, İlke Şanlıer who leads the Migration Research Centre at Çukurova University in Adana, Turkey, and who became our co-producer for the play. The fact that the women were confined to Turkey shaped both the subject of our play and its form. As in Queens of Syria there is specific personal testimony - but for our project it was impossible for this to be delivered directly from the stage. Instead we had to film the women's interviews, and this necessity came to symbolise the wider issues of exclusion and othering which surround the discourse on migration. This in turn led to the use of the Greek theatre model - three professional performers set against a large community Chorus - to create our dramaturgical structure. 

It’s important for our work that we should be self-aware in making the piece, and so move the audience towards a similar reflexivity. Simply putting a refugee’s personal story on stage does make a statement, but as an intercultural theatre company we also need to consider the act of watching, the role of the spectator, and so the role of the society in which the event is happening. A carefully considered contextualisation deepens the meaning of the testimony: without this, it is far too easy for a British or European audience to become self-satisfied in the mere act of listening to people from the Arab region. In the case of Syrian people confined to Turkey by the EU-Turkey deal, there is a real responsibility to be considered, and this goes much deeper than the specifics of one particular situation. Why do Europeans exclude people from the region? Why the  prejudice? Why the constant assertion of superiority? Why the fear?

Facing these questions in dialogue with the material offered to us by the Syrian women, we found ourselves making a piece which confronted the rise of fascism across the world, across Europe, and particularly in our own communities. We realised that there is nothing specifically Arabic or Islamic about the institutional cruelties practised and indeed performed by ISIS: this sort of fascistic tendency is present in our own society, and made manifest in the prejudices displayed against refugees, the demonisation of Islam, and the attitude which many men continue to display towards women. 

At the centre of the performance was a debate with the audience, and I think that symbolised the way in which the play placed itself within a discourse. I'm incredibly grateful to the researchers who helped to generate that. 

The Death of the Mask-Maker

Masks for Aeschylus' Suppliants by Thanos Vovolis

A few months ago, I had an online chat with the Greek designer Thanos Vovolis. I had been thinking about the use of masks in Ancient Greek theatre, wanting to employ them in SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA. Thanos is a superb mask maker, and his approach is rooted in deep research, both archival and practical. It was Thanos who really developed an understanding that the Greek theatrical mask was more like a helmet than a face covering, and that its internal echo was what made it a powerful resonator for the voice in open-air spaces. “It was designed for epic, mythic communication”, he said to me, “for the gods to call across the mountains.”

Thanos is very conscious of just how anachronistic the mask has become, even in his own lifetime. Hyper-naturalism is the fashion now, even in the avant-garde, and there is a deep distrust of mythic scale. As the Epstein controversy shows, we relish the mundanity, the squalor of those who dare to lead us. No gods and heroes now. 

There is one exception to this prevailing theatrical trend, and that is the Théâtre du Soleil, under its extraordinary octogenarian director Ariane Mnouchkine. As Thanos said to me, Mnouchkine’s work, which is always rooted in the mask, seeks to find the sacred even in the grubby histories of the present age. Working with the actors of the Soleil in CRE-ACTORS and THE LEGEND OF EUROPA, I’ve also realised how much the company’s use of mask (coupled with costume and props) emphasises the materiality from which a character emerges. It’s a Marxian approach at the same time as it’s a mythic one. As Peter Brook used to say, a theatre that combines the Holy and the Rough. 

A masked performer in Mnouchkine's L'Ile d'Or

On February 14th, Erhard Stiefel, who had been the Théâtre du Soleil’s mask maker for many years, passed away. He was, of course, still working to the end. He wasn’t particularly famous or noticed - unlike Mnouchkine or musician Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, he was not to be seen nightly at the Cartoucherie. He worked quietly in the background. But Mnouchkine constantly impresses upon the actors that the masks are “nos maîtres” (our masters). Their holiness is what enables the characters’ spirits to enter into the performers’ bodies.

Five days later, on February 19th, Ariane Mnouchkine finally announced that she would have a successor as director at the Théâtre du Soleil: Sylvian Creuzevault.  She is approaching her 87th birthday, so retirement has been on the cards for a while. But two things struck me about her timing. One was that she made the announcement in a speech that was also a response to the accusations of sexual harassment and cult-like behaviour that have been made against her company in the media - accusations that all the company members I know regard as malicious. (There's a useful analysis of this here). To be dragged into the world of the petty would not appeal to Ariane. The second was just how quickly the announcement came after the passing of Erhard Stiefel. Without that high priest of her theatre, the creator of the sacred, the lone figure emerging from the stillness of the Holy of Holies with the actors’ spiritual masters in this hands - without Stiefel, Mnouchkine’s practice must, of necessity, come to rest.  

There are other mask makers, of course. Thanos is a great one, and so is Erin Jacques, who has made the beautiful pieces we are putting on stage this week. But after decades of intimate collaboration, it feels right that at this moment, she should finally step away. 

Performing Possibility

Over the last year, Border Crossings Ireland has been leading a European Youth project called PERFORMING POSSIBILITY, working with our great friends at Teatro dell'Argine and Opera di Padre Marella in Bologna, and with the YMCA in Cork. This post takes the form of a conversation between Brenda Musiani, who works at Opera di Padre Marella, Rowan Mohan who travelled to Bologna from Cork, and two young Afghan sisters who now live in Italy: Om Hani and Hosna Yalani.

Brenda: I will start with some questions. What did you expect from the project? What was your idea of the project at the beginning? 

Rowan: I think it was a way of capturing what is like living in Europe, with young people's experiences from all over the world, whether that is people who were born in Europe or people from outside Europe coming to live in Europe. Sharing our experiences, finding similarities and differences, sharing our stories and what is like for us. 

Om Hani: The first idea of the project was the idea of meeting people from outside Italy, sharing our ideas, getting to know each other and know other cultures. 

Brenda: Do you think that meeting with people from different countries and sharing ideas strengthen our sense of belonging to Europe? 

Rowan: Definitely. I think it is really important to put different countries in communication and for everyone to see different experiences. Because without that we’re isolated, we only have our own view and things can’t be done on our own. We need a community to bring change, and I think change is important in Europe. 

Hosna and Om Hani: We agree! 

Brenda: It is very important to share thoughts and to really be together: also to be physically in one place to connect with people. 

Rowan: I think it was really important to capture that in the digital outputs, so more people can see it. And it was good from my perspective. I have experience in digital media, but Hosna and Om Hani, what was it like to have that experience with digital creativity and to have to deal with creating content?

Hosna: It was our first time doing this kind of activity, where we were the ones that needed to create the digital output. Also it is the first time that we have participated in a project like this, where people from other countries come here. It was interesting and we learned a lot of new things. 

Rowan: I have to say that one of my favourite experiences in Bologna was capturing the interviews with both of you. It was very impactful to get that account of your experiences and thank you so much for sharing that. I think that if it was the only piece of media captured in the entire week, I would have been happy with that. 

Hosna: We also had a great time with you, and we also want to say thank you. 

Rowan: I think it was really important to capture your story, not only for us but also for other people to hear and to know. It was really impactful. 

Brenda: We really can see the importance of doing all these things, for us in the project but also for all the people that will see our digital outputs and that will share those. In your opinion, is it important to share all these outputs and to do this kind of projects, also in the perspective of future generations?

Om Hani: Definitely! In this project there were many different cultures and people together, and that was very important to me. I liked the fact that we had the chance to live for a week with people from another country, and did all these activities together. 

Rowan: I completely agree.

Brenda: One last question. What are the reflections that you bring home with you after this project?

Rowan: I think I’m bringing home the perspectives of everyone I met. Seeing so many different cultures and so many people with different perspectives of the world, opinions of where they are in Europe, what being European means... I think I’m coming back home with a wider mind and a wider view of what the world is, what Europe means to other people and what it should be. 

Hosna: I’m bringing home with me the meeting of new people and new cultures. How different people from different countries get along with each other, even with cultural differences. 

Om Hani: I really liked this project because it was very nice to meet people from a different culture and to get to know them. The time spent with each other was really precious since there was no judgement and we could talk openly about our opinions. The most difficult part though was to talk in English, but even if there was a language barrier we did communicate in our own ways.

Brenda: What I see is that you all have similarities in your reflections and that’s a big thing because in my opinion this project now belongs to everyone and it became an experience that you all lived together. 

This project is funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. However, European Commission and Irish National Agency cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

2025

THE LEGEND OF EUROPA - Sanam Nederi

Regular readers of this blog (I know you're there - and I'm very grateful!) will know that I usually mark the turn of the year with a review of Border Crossings' activities over the previous 12 months, and a look forward into the New Year. This year it seems a slightly strange exercise, as we've already been devoting time to looking back at our work in our CHECKPOINT project, which marks 2025 as the 30th anniversary of the organisation's founding. At the end of November, we held a celebratory event at Hoxton Hall (video version coming soon), which included a series of short new plays made in response to our past work by the next generation of theatre-makers: pupils at Chiswick School, 6th formers at St Charles College, BA World Performance students from East 15, and MFA students from Rose Bruford. As the evening went on, and the pieces we were re-visiting became more distant from the present, there were new plays by the original artists: Brian Woolland re-visited Anna Kovács from DOUBLE TONGUE, to see what she was doing a quarter of a century on; and Mahesh Dattani wrote BRAVELY FIGHTS THE QUEEN, which brought the warring Trivedi sisters from BRAVELY FOUGHT THE QUEEN back together in the present day. It was one kind of great joy to have Anna performed by the Hungarian film star Dorka Gryllus, alongside Andrew French as Anna's new partner Mark; and another kind of joy to see Harvey Virdi and Siddiqua Akhtar return to the roles they had played in 1996. The final piece was one I wrote myself, to be performed by Nisha Dassyne, my dear wife who has been so crucial to the company's work in so many ways; some very visible, some known only to herself and me. THE DEATH OF PROSPERO revisited THE TEMPEST as performed in India in 1995 (not strictly a Border Crossings project, but undoubtedly the piece that generated the company's ethos and raison d'être), Dev Virahsawmy's adaptation of the same play as TOUFANN, and (more obliquely) THE GREAT EXPERIMENT. "Prospero is dead" it ended. "Where do we go from here?"

CHECKPOINT - Harvey Virdi and Siddiqua Akhtar

The question feels horribly urgent as we move into 2026. The last few decades have seen the dismantling of all the old certainties that Prospero could be held to represent: patriarchy, colonialism, hierarchy.... It's been a necessary process, and one towards which I hope we have made a genuine contribution. But, as Prospero's daughter Kordelia says in her eulogy at his funeral, we have not put anything in their place. It is that absence of vision, that failure of imagination, that has opened a political space into which the radical right has stepped, with increasing confidence and aggression during the year that has just ended. This is a global phenomenon: the Gaza genocide, Russia's ongoing attacks on Ukraine, the besieging of asylum hotels in Essex and elsewhere, the racist march in London, Trump's personalisation and privatisation of the entire American polity - all of these make manifest the total impoverishment of our public discourse, the reduction of human beings to one-word labels which in turn become pretexts for othering, prejudice and violence. As I said when I introduced the CHECKPOINT performance, this is the reason why active and deliberate remembering has become so important today: because the telling of complex, nuanced and engaged histories offers a form of resistance to the reductive and the prejudiced narratives promulgated by the "disruptors". And in resistance, there is also hope.

SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA

So in 2026, we will continue the process of remembering that CHECKPOINT represents. Our archivist, Gary Haines, will put our records into order, while our researcher Dr. Jasmin ‘Ofamo’oni works on the book of the company's history that we'll be publishing during the year. Our next project, SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA, arrives on the London stage in early March, and this too represents a kind of remembering. Back in 1999, we co-produced another response to Aeschylus' Suppliants, this one dealing with the Kosovo conflict as envisioned by South African writer Tamantha Hammerschlag and Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou. Both that play and the new one make use of an ancient text, the second oldest dramatic text in existence, to enable a fuller, more historicised and ethically informed discourse around current issues of warfare, displacement and gender. Standing in a long tradition of theatre as an enabler of democracy matters deeply right now.  

We'll also be continuing the major European projects that our Irish company has initiated in 2025. THE LEGEND OF EUROPA is another dialogue with the Greeks, in this case a set of contemporary variations on the continent's foundational myth, which makes it abundantly clear that Europe is defined and sustained  by what is outside its borders. The play that is evolving slowly through through workshops in Ireland, Italy, France and Sweden, involving many artists of both European and migrants backgrounds, attempts to situate itself in the current turmoil as an assertion of common humanity, redefining the continent through its mythological bases as an open and collaborative space. Of course, in order to make it, we need to generate just such a space ourselves. Being the change we want to see in the world.

A Happy New Year to you all.

Jane Plastow

Jane Plastow in Africa

I was very sad to hear of the passing of Prof. Jane Plastow, one of the influential academics in the field of African Theatre who have for some decades populated the University of Leeds, and run the Studio Theatre there. We took The Dilemma of a Ghost there back in 2007 - undoubtedly the best informed audience we had for that piece of African theatre in the UK! I'd always mentally grouped Jane with Martin Banham, James Gibbs, Michael Etherton, David Kerr and our former Chair the late Alastair Niven as the pioneers who made the study of African literatures, and especially performance, not only legitimate but essential for modern scholarship. Reading the obituaries, I realise that Jane was actually quite a bit younger than the rest of that coterie: she was 66. Professors are supposed to keep on generating research long after most others have retired, so it's all the sadder that Jane has gone. 

That doesn't mean she hasn't left a terrific legacy. I got to know her as one of the Editors of the excellent series of books on African Theatre: I've contributed to several volumes and always loved the breadth of material included, which always embraces practitioners as well as scholars.  Unlike the British theatre, which likes to practice a weird inverse snobbery towards the academy, African theatres flourish in academic settings - most notably the University of Ibadan's Department of Theatre Arts. African theatre-makers knew that Jane's work mattered: no less a figure than Wole Soyinka attended her inaugural lecture. This synergy is related to the importance of theatre to activism in African contexts: it's no accident that one of Jane's edited books is called Theatre Matters.  For her and her African colleagues, theatre absolutely matters. It is part of liberation struggles, education, empowerment and democracy. The rest of us should learn from it.

Jane's activism was passed on to her son William: and it adds to the sadness of her early death that it has happened while William is being detained for his role in the Palestine Action protest against the Elbit Systems factory in August last year. His trial date has been set for April 2026, meaning that he will have been detained for 21 months before he is finally tried. Jane believed this to be the longest anyone will have ever been held in jail awaiting trial on protest-related charges. Custody time limits clearly state that defendants should not spend more than six months in jail awaiting trial. 

Jane was understandably outraged at the way her son was being treated. Even if Palestine Action is to be regarded as a terrorist organisation (and I emphatically believe that it should not), William is certainly not guilty of crimes against people or threatening lives. Jane had offered £50,000 bail, and agreed that William could live in her house, with all internet access removed, his body tagged, his phone and passport confiscated, and still the bail was denied.

It is deeply distressing that Jane has passed away with her son's case remaining unresolved.

WRITE THEATRE - Guest blog by Brian Woolland

In Border Crossings' 30th anniversary year, playwright Brian Woolland looks back over his long association with the company, and forward to this autumn's WRITE THEATRE course, in association with Border Crossings Laboratory.

FOOL FOR LOVE (1995). Maria Gough & Miles Harvey

My first contact with Border Crossings was 30 years ago, when I saw Michael Walling’s production of Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love. As with many of Shepard’s plays, it’s extraordinarily evocative, the characterisation is complex, the language very rich. Michael’s direction brought out all these qualities, but he didn’t impose himself on the play. The audience was given space to respond to the compellingly enigmatic qualities of the play. 

Soon after that, Michael Walling and I established an excellent working relationship that continues to thrive because we share a vision of theatre as a social and collaborative art form that honours all the participants in the process – including the audience.

This blog is specifically about the forthcoming playwriting course, WRITE THEATRE, that  I’ll be jointly leading later this autumn, but it is also about the diverse nature of the collaborative process in theatre; and how running WRITE THEATRE has been as helpful to me in my own writing as I hope it has been for those who have taken part.

Collaboration and Border Crossings

None of the plays I’ve written for Border Crossings have been devised, but they have all involved various kinds of collaboration. Sometimes that takes the form of a simple dialogue about an early draft of the script; sometimes (usually at a later stage in the process) working alongside Michael and actors, trying out ideas, responding to suggestions. This can be a kind of ‘trying out,’ an opportunity to see how other people respond to material, a way of looking at what I’ve written through other people’s eyes. It’s crucial in such a process to avoid ‘defending’ the writing. There’s a temptation to tell the actors ‘This is what I intended.’ It’s much more useful to see and hear what others make of those early drafts. That word ‘make’ is central here because it gets at something that’s often forgotten when material is presented to an audience at any stage in its development: that the audience is active in making meaning, whether in a theatre auditorium, actors or students in workshop studio or a colleague in discussion over a coffee.

WHEN NOBODY RETURNS (2016). Tariq Jordan & Bayan Schbib

In the case of When Nobody Returns (which draws on The Odyssey and is focused as much on Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, as on his father) I led a series of workshops with young people from military families before attempting to write anything of the play itself. My blog for Border Crossings, Playing with Greek Fire, discusses how important these workshops were in the development of that play. 

In advance of the workshops, I formulated a set of what I call key focusing questions; questions that would not only inform and drive the workshops, but would also go on to drive the explorations I undertook in writing the play itself. These can be summarised as follows:

• What do we mean by ‘home’?
• How can people return from war without bringing the war with them?
• When is it right to forget? When is it right to resist the temptation to forget?
• How does somebody on the edge of adulthood negotiate a sense of their own identity in relation to an absent parent?

The young people were remarkably open and their responses very revealing, giving me a strong sense of the emotional landscape of the play. 

The idea of Key Focusing Questions is something I’ve found very useful. Keeping that uppermost in my mind, rather than what I want to say, is a way of trying to ensure that I’m using the writing as a process of collaborative exploration and discovery. It also keeps me more open and alert to the contributions of others. I’m not denying my authorship, but, rather, giving it full rein. 

WRITE THEATRE and collaboration

WRITE THEATRE: actors read the scripts

Playwrights have to spend a great deal of time alone on the hard graft of developing a playscript. But writing for theatre is essentially different from writing novels, short stories or poetry in that collaborations are at the heart of theatre; and that is reflected in the way that WRITE THEATRE courses are organised – with collaborative workshops, open discussions, practical exercises and one-on-one tutorials. 

The courses run over two weekends a fortnight apart. The first weekend comprises a series of workshops. Writer-participants work as a group, individually and in pairs, undertaking active writing exercises exploring elements such as dialogue, characterisation, plotting and thinking visually. These are not lectures but active workshops. Rib Davis (my colleague and co-leader) and I always take part in each other’s sessions. In the spirit of collaboration which we aim to foster throughout, we work with you, the course participants. The small numbers ensure that your contributions are always valued. The workshops are designed to enable you to find your own voice. It’s your ideas we work with.

In the two week gap between the first and second weekend of the course, every participant writes a short scene.

In the second weekend: course directors and professional actors explore these scenes, encouraging and enabling further development. That is what makes the course unique. The actors we work with are all highly experienced professionals who are enthusiastic about helping new writers, and know how to develop new writing by workshopping early drafts.

It’s not surprising, given the spirit of collaboration that we encourage throughout, that Rib and I have often find the course unblocks our own writing.

Applying for a place on the course

There is a strict upper limit of 8 participants on any WRITE THEATRE playwriting course. We do not ask for qualifications as a pre-requisite for acceptance on the course, nor do we ask participants to have had previous experience of writing plays, but it is essential to have a strong interest in theatre.

WRITE THEATRE courses take place at The Cockpit, Gateforth Street, near Marylebone.

If you’d like to enrol on our next course on the weekends October 25th – 26th and November 8th – 9th, go to the Enrolment page of the WRITE THEATRE website.

If you wish to enrol for the whole course (i.e. BOTH weekends), the fee is £500. We are offering a 10% discount to anyone signed up in response to this blog or the Border Crossings newsletter. Quote BC25.

To encourage young writers we offer a 50% discount to a limited number of writers under the age of 30. 

Evita and the politics of celebrity

Rachel Zegler in Evita at the London Palladium

I'd so far steered clear of the unstoppable juggernaut called The Jamie Lloyd Company. It all feels a bit too mogul formulaic for me: hire a mega-star, put them in a play people have heard of, hire a West End theatre, charge a fortune for tickets, give it a grunge aesthetic...   In fairness, there have clearly been times when it's worked incredibly well: the James McAvoy Cyrano sounds fascinating, for example - but then there was the Sigourney Weaver Tempest....  

Evita felt like a better bet: it's a piece that belongs in the West End, that really is a star vehicle, and (like most musicals) benefits from a bit of whizz-kid directing. It's also a bit of a nostalgia piece for me. I saw the original production with my parents and brother when we stopped off in London on our way to Heathrow for a family holiday. Kelly Hunter, who has since become a great friend, played Peron's Mistress. She was 17 then, and so was I. We're a bit older now. I had the recording, and knew all the words. Actually, it seems I still do.

Jamie Lloyd's production is far removed from that original by Hal Prince, with its 1940s costumes and recreations of press images. Aside of the lyrics, and occasional hints of Hispanic accents ("ArHentina" passim), there's precious little sense of mid-century Latin America at all. It's a rock concert. Rachel Zegler makes her first appearance as a curtain lifts to show her standing in her black leather bra and hotpants in front of a huge illuminated sign that says "Evita". The audience roars. Subtle it is not - but as a staging of the character's funeral, you can't fault it for radical deconstruction.

And the radical deconstruction works. As the evening travels through a series of stadium-style, high-energy, crowd-pleasing choreographic showstoppers, you can't help but get caught up in the sheer stariness of the whole thing, and particularly the central performance. Rachel Zegler's singing is wonderful, and she exudes vitality at the centre of the dance numbers. It was like watching the young Madonna - which is more than a little ironic, given Madonna's lacklustre performance of a role she might have been born to play in the film version. But that's political theatre for you: if you're too close to the character, you're in no position to offer a commentary. Such was the scale of Madonna's Evita-like ego that she insisted on singing the Mistress's song herself, and requested a new, mawkishly sentimental number to garner audience sympathy as Eva nears her end ("You must love me" is unfortunately retained here - and the production loses focus as a result). What is fascinating in Rachel Zegler's performance is that, for all her magnetism, she has no fear of playing against audience sympathy, moving in sudden leaps from charismatic star to amoral manipulator. So, even as you ride the rock-concert wave of it all, you come to see ever more clearly the shocking politics behind it. It's a show about celebrity, about politics as celebrity, about stardom as self-interest, about policy as profiteering. 

Rachel Zegler sings from the balcony

The big number comes directly after the interval. It's become a cause célèbre, but not for appropriate reasons. Unless, of course, the marketing guys planned it that way...  Certainly the column inches spent on Zegler singing from the Palladium balcony to the (horror - unpaying) crowd of adoring fans in the street outside have contributed significantly to the size of that crowd: not so much unpaying audience as unpaid extras whose numbers more than suggest the people of Argentina, gathered to hear Eva Peron's speech at her husband's inauguration. They are, of coure, Zegler's fans; but in this construct, relayed by video to the (paying) theatre audience, they become Evita's fans too, and a complex metatheatrical metaphor is established. It's all the more telling because this is the only moment in the show where Eva is dressed in the expected historical costume, and those of us in the theatre get to see her remove the spangled dress and the blonde wig in the aftermath of the big number. That powerful image of Eva Peron orating from the balcony of the Casa Rosada, which later became the image of the starry musical and the hit song, is exposed as a theatrical and electonically mediated construct. And still we clap, and still we cheer.

Back in the 70s, there were two stars in the Prince production. Elaine Paige was Evita, and David Essex played opposite her as Che Guevara (they never met in real life, although Che did once write Evita a letter asking her to buy him a jeep). In those days, Che did present a form of left-wing stardom, his poster image adorning many a student wall. David Essex was perfect casting: not only for the look, but because he exuded an edgy, sexy, working-class anger. Jamie Lloyd offers no such hope: and I'm afraid he's probably right. His Che, as Andrzej Lukowski puts in in his excellent Time Out review, "assumes more of a Jiminy Cricket role": you would never know this young man with a nice voice was anything more than a slightly grumpy older brother. There is no hint of activism, never mind revolution. Charisma left the left a long time ago, and theory (of which Guevara was very aware) now insists on the collective rather than the star. Celebrity is entirely the tool of the right, and politics has become its playground. Rags to riches stories, amazing singers emerging from obscurity, these are the tools of the individualistic neoliberal narrative. 

We paid a lot to go and see a rising mega-star. The production powerfully and intelligently questioned that action. And pocketed our cash.  

Culture and the New Imperialism

THIS FLESH IS MINE
Andrew French and Tariq Jordan. Photo: Richard Davenport

A few months ago, I had the chance to spend an evening chatting with Ken Livingstone. It was wonderful. Ken is 80 now, and his short-term memory isn't perfect, but his long-term memory absolutely is and his political understanding seems as sharp as ever. He also displayed a rare generosity of spirit, telling me how much he admired John Major, who had been his predecessor as Leader of Lambeth Council back in the 70s, and who "got things done". He was, it's fair to say, much less generous in his assessment of Boris Johnson, who "just didn't do the job" as Mayor of London (or anything else); but his only real bitterness was reserved for the tabloid press, who had caused him great personal pain and political turmoil by labelling him an anti-Semite. The same, of course, happened to Jeremy Corbyn. You've got to hand it to the Tory tabloids: only they could so manipulate the media as to convince the bulk of the population that men like these, who have dedicated much of their life to campaigning against racism, are actually themselves racists.

I've had some experience of this myself. Back in 2014, when we presented THIS FLESH IS MINE in a co-production with ASHTAR Theatre from Ramallah, I received quite a number of emails which accused me, and the company, of being anti-Semitic. There were no explicit references to Jewishness or Israel (or even Palestine) in the play, which deliberately used a mythological framing to distance its exploration of the cyclical nature of violence and its manipulation by global power blocs from the detailed specifics of the ongoing occupation. It seemed that the simple action of collaborating with Palestinian artists, which I absolutely agree in itself does come to constitute a political statement, was also regarded as inherently anti-Semitic. Where is the racism in that equation? In the artists who reach out to one another with the aim of furthering dialogue and understanding, or in the person who regards anything and anyone Palestinian as by definition expressing hatred towards Jewish people?

The ongoing genocide in Gaza has brought these issues to the fore again. Our online reading of THE GAZA MONOLOGUES in late 2023 attracted Zoom-bombers, who were determined that the stories of Gazan youth should not be heard. We did all we could to make sure they were heard, and to avoid making the Zoom-bombing itself into "the story". This is a real problem in the current debate (and I feel very conscious that in some ways this post is itself contributing to that problem). I have every sympathy with the people who have been calling on the media to stop making Bob Vylan's Glastonbury performance "the story", as this only distracts from the reality of what is happening in the Occupied Territories. Chanting “Death, death to the IDF” does not represent any sort of humanitarian or nuanced approach: but neither does the (nominally Labour) UK government's response, which has been to condemn the BBC for allowing its live stream of the concert to continue. The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has been taking an ever-more aggressive stance towards the public broadcaster over its coverage of Gaza, most recently demanding "Why has nobody been fired?" in relation to the BBC's showing of the exceptional and very moving documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which was pulled from iPlayer when it emerged that the 13 year old narrator was the son of a Hamas official. 

Let's pause there for a moment. Does the identity of the boy's father actually make the film inherently biased or inaccurate? I don't think so. The statistics around casualties issued by the Gaza health ministry are actually lower than most estimates, and that's because they are carefully verified. The BBC always states that these statistics come from "the Hamas-run Health Ministry", which is the equivalent of saying that we have "the Labour-run Health Ministry". Hamas is the elected government of Gaza. Yes, the UK government (and many others) regards it as a terrorist organisation, but this is a matter of semantics and positionality. The activist group Palestine Action is also now a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK, even though its actions could easily and more appropriately be prosecuted as criminal damage. South Africa's ANC was also a proscribed terrorist organisation before that narrative underwent a complete turnaround. The Hamas attack on Israel was undoubtedly brutal and indiscriminate: but is it really justified to describe this action by an elected government as a simple (and mindlessly evil) "terror attack", if the actions of the elected (if decidely insecure six-party coalition) government of Israel are always called acts of "war", or even of "self-defence"? Why do we not call the actions of Israel "terrorism", or the actions of Hamas "war"? Isn't the difference only in the viewpoint? The documentary was as objective (and as subjective) as any other film made by and about young people going through constant bombardment and daily trauma. The only justification for its effective banning is the sense that this is somehow the work of "the enemy": a sense that also implies a view of Israel as being on "our side", the "good guys" in a Manichean, black and white world. The language and the discourse, the cultural dimension, really matter; particularly in this conflict which has such huge implications for the entire world.

The kind of censorship and prejudice that Nandy is exercising is not confined to the UK. America has a long-standing commitment to stamping out any criticism of Israel: Trump's attacks on students who protest against the genocide are only a logical development of the unwavering support shown by the US towards what is essentially its client state in a geopolitically vital region. Mainland Europe, and particularly Germany, is moving ever further to the right, which includes increasing its support for Israel, both economically and culturally. To give a few examples:

- Last month my friend Elli Papakonstantinou was presenting her theatre piece Holy Bitch at the Neuköllner Oper in Berlin. It's an angry, feminist work, and at one point there was a brief reference to the genocide in Gaza. The management asked her to remove this from the show, and, when she did not, greatly reduced the publicity they gave to the work. Journalists refused to cover it. The subtitles went blank when the dreaded word "genocide" was spoken.

- Lina Majdalanie & Rabih Mroué are Lebanese artists living in Berlin, whose most recent work Four Walls and a Roof used Brecht's 1947 appearance before the "Un-American Activities Committee" of Congress to delve into questions of artistic freedom. At one point, they mention that when they first came to Germany, people used to ask them about censorship in Lebanon. Now people in Lebanon are asking them about censorship in Germany. 

- Back in 2022, before the latest overwhelming attacks on Palestinian populations, the great playwright Caryl Churchill had an award for her lifetime's achievement rescinded by a German-appointed jury because of her support for Palestinian causes. As Lina Majdalanie puts it: "Cancellation of invitations, awards, conferences, theatrical  pieces, exhibitions... Public accusation and condemnation of this writer or that artist, or anyone else... Dismissal of journalists, academics... Public funding subject to political obedience... The list goes on."

- In April 2020, the German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, decided that the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe was "not suitable" to deliver the keynote at the Ruhrtriennale because of his supposed anti-Semitism. The root of this accusation turned out to be Mbembe's 2016 essay The Society of Enmity, in which he applies post-colonial ideas, examining Israel as a settler-colony, and pointing out how the treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories "recall the reviled model of apartheid". 

Mbembe's argument seems decidedly mild and understated in the light of what has happened since. It wasn't even a particularly unusual point to make. As long ago as 1951, Hannah Arendt had pointed out links between Germany's history as a colonial power and the development of the systematic murder machines of the Nazis' Holocaust against the Jews and other perceived "enemies". Mbembe's point was that European (and by extension, North American) societies have a need for a racialised "Other" - "a Negro, a Jew, an Arab, a foreigner" - to provide a justification for their acquisitive and rapacious colonisation of territories beyond their own. The "resettlement of the world" he explained, "often took the shape of innumerable atrocities and massacres, unprecedented instances of 'ethnic cleansing', expulsions, transfers, and concentrations of entire populations in camps, and indeed of genocides." The first genocide of the 20th century was not the Third Reich's Holocaust but the massacre of Herero and Nama people in Namibia by the German Second Reich. The mindless racism that it betrayed serves to underline Mbembe's point that Nazism cannot be regarded as uniquely evil, but should be understood as an extreme maifestation of the cultural mindset that underpinned imperialism, and continues to be present in neo-colonialism today. 

The reason Mbembe's argument was deemed anti-Semitic was not simply that he compared Israel's policy towards Palestine with settler colonialism and apartheid, but also that his placing of the Holocaust in an historical and cultural perspective undermined the prevailing belief that this event was uniquely evil in the history of the world. It suits the state of Israel to construct the Holocaust as exceptional and evil rather than historical, because that can be regarded as a justification for the total paranoia with which it segregates its populations, militarises its borders and attacks its neighbours. It also suits Germany, and the wider constructs of "Europe" and "the West" in which that state plays such a leading role. "Vergangenheitsbewältigung", the "struggle of overcoming the past", has come over time to elide into a strangely self-congratulaory position, whereby unquestioning German support for Israel and a delusional imagining of anti-Semitism in every critique of Israeli policy represents a fundamental break with the past. Paradoxically, it also permits other forms of racism to take hold, as the current drift to the right bears witness. If something is "Evil" then it ceases to be historically and culturally explicable: it becomes simply an enemy to be fought perpetually and incessantly. This is how fascism comes to beget more fascism.

The moment we look at the Holocaust as an historical event, then both its deep roots in European culture and colonialism and its current repercussions in global geopolitics make much more sense. "Reich" means "Empire": Nazism was a logical development of the 1492 project - the process whereby a self-satisfiedly "Christian" and "civilised" Europe imposed its hegemony on much of the world, with racist ideology as its justification. Israel's unbridled aggression is a similar continuation of what Columbus began: Western economic interests and a religion of the Book are being used to wipe out an indigenous population. It is through a nation's relationship to colonial histories that its stance on Palestine can most clearly be understood. The United States is an Empire founded on genocide: of course it supports the state of Israel. Great Britain ran the largest Empire the world has ever seen: it too, supports Israel. Germany is in a weird space of denial about its Imperial past: and it supports Israel. On the other hand, a country like Ireland (which we are proud to call Border Crossings' second homebase) has a colonised people's understanding of land grabs, of the use of religion to mask political incursions, of hunger as a weapon, of partition and the militarization of the streets. Ireland has a strong affinity with the Palestinian cause: as this current exhibition in London attests. The vast majority of the Global South - the nations that understand what it is to be colonised - stand with the Palestinian people too. It is deeply depressing to see that humanity is still locked in to the colonial paradigm. 

We need to re-think how post-coloniality is applied. The "post-" doesn't just mean "after": it means "in relation to". Culture and the academy have made much of post-colonialism in relation to cultures and peoples that once were colonised, to the extent that the approach has come to seem a bit tired, and rather patronising, as if (say) Gikuyu society in Kenya can only be understood in relation to the former (and current) British presence there. But if we turn the post-colonial mirror back on the former colonisers, it becomes altogether more illuminating. Let us start to recognise that we still behave as we do on the world stage because of the deep-seated assumptions and prejudices that made our societies into colonial powers. Let us recognise that the crass sloganeering of the right ("Take Back Control", "Make America Great Again") evokes a colonial policy of agression, acquisition and oppression, grotesquely misrepresented as "greatness". Once we have dared to look properly at ourselves, perhaps then we will be able to stop supporting genocide, and cease to brand as racist the very people who are standing against the scourge of racism. 

The views expressed in this post are personal to the author and do not represent an official position of Border Crossings.

PERFORMING POSSIBILITY - Guest blog by Niamh McGrath

Niamh McGrath in the
PERFORMING POSSIBILITY workshop in Cork

Alongside THE LEGEND OF EUROPA, Border Crossings and Teatro dell’Argine are also collaborating on a Youth project under the Erasmus + programme, called PERFORMING POSSIBILITY, together with the YMCA in Cork and Opera di Padre Marella in Bologna.  Although this is a self-contained project in its own right, PERFORMING POSSIBILITY is also proving hugely helpful in researching material for the professional theatre work.  

The young people in Cork, many of whom live in very remote rural areas of the county, have little experience of European travel, and few opportunities to encounter people their own age who live in different countries and diverse communities, particularly migrants and refugees. The young people at Opera di Padre Marella have often faced huge challenges in their journeys to Italy, and continue to encounter prejudice and bureaucratic difficulties as they attempt to forge new lives in Europe. The encounter between these very different groups is hugely valuable in and of itself: for that encounter to be creative, playful, exploratory and dialogic makes it deeply significant for them all.  

At the heart of the EUROPA myth is the story of the Athenian youth - seven young men and seven young women - who were regularly offered as food for the Minotaur: a tribute to appease the Cretan King Minos, who would otherwise invade Athens. This myth of young people being sacrificed to preserve the status quo feels horribly close to our contemporary situation, particularly when working with young people who have already given up and suffered so much in the hope of finding peaceful, comfortable lives in Europe, only to face suspicion, prejudice and stereotyping.  

What follows is an account by Niamh McGrath, one of the participants in the first workshop in Cork, of her experiences around encounter, art and advocacy.  

*

PERFORMING POSSIBILITY was a workshop that explored the themes of immigration, stay versus leave and connectivity through theatre and other forms of media. 

I’m writing this on June 8th, which marks World Ocean Day. On this day one can reflect on all the positives of the ocean: a source of food, a recreational area and a means of transportation and connectivity. But living on the island of Ireland, one has to acknowledge that while oceans, seas and other bodies of water can facilitate transport, they also lead to isolation. 

Ireland is on the edge of the European Union. This means that the young people in Ireland are not as connected with the rest of our EU peers to the extent we should be. Therefore the cultural exchange that PERFORMING POSSIBILITY offered is one that is so valued. For myself and 20 other young people in Cork, we had to opportunity to talk to other young people living in the EU. These young people are living in Bologna in Italy, another edge of the EU. These young people were immigrants, who had come from places such as Tunisia, Ukraine and Afghanistan. We were able to talk over Zoom. We talked about our dreams for the future, our music tastes and parts of our cultures (e.g. food). I hope that this cultural exchange will only be the beginning. 

One of the main themes we explored over the week was the idea of staying or going. On the Wednesday, our group wrote reasons to stay and reasons to go on two different pieces of paper. Then on Thursday, in pairs, we picked out words and phrases that appealed to us and wrote something about it. After we would write something, our partners would then respond with something else. My partner Pádraig and I circled around a reason to stay: to walk down the same streets as one’s ancestors. Pádraig came up with the phrase “to walk in the worn down comfortable footprints”. This line has stuck with me. The idea that if I were to leave Ireland, I would be leaving the comfort, the familiar and my own history. 

After writing pieces and answering each other, Pádraig and I had created a piece of theatrical writing that debated the idea of immigration. Then we practised performing the piece. This for me was the tricky bit, as I would not be an actor. But from this experience I have gained a greater understanding of the weight words can carry and how important and thought provoking a few well placed pauses can be. 

The thing that I believe will always stick with me from this experience is the realisation of the links between advocacy and art. There are many was to advocate for change - lobbying policy makers, running campaigns, protesting - but also through the arts. Theatre and drama can tell a story, prove a point and provoke a thought. The power in the delivery of what you say is priceless. 

In my opinion the best part of the workshop was the new perspective I left with. The workshop not only opened my eyes to the power of theatre but also showed me a snapshot into the lives of other young people who are living on another edge of Europe. This experience is something I would one hundred percent recommend.