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.

Gauri Lankesh

Some twenty years ago - in what now seems a more innocent, humane, compassionate time - I spent several months in the Southern Indian city of Bangalore, directing THE TEMPEST for Mahesh Dattani's Playpen company.  It was a life-changing experience for me, leading to the creation of Border Crossings as a company committed to intercultural work; and I believe it was also an important production for the cultural environment in which it took place.  One of the great pleasures of that time was to be surrounded by an extraordinary group of creative, committed and questioning young Indians - actors, writers, artists, film-makers and journalists. Young people who cared about what was happening in the world, who understood the historical forces that had shaped and were shaping their country, who longed for justice and who believed they could make a difference.  For a short time, I felt as if I was one of them - and that sense of hope has remained with me ever since.  From time to time I have seen or exchanged emails with many of them.  I still do. We have all retained some sense of the young people we once were and have clung to the dreams we once dreamed.

Central to that inspiring group of people was the journalist Gauri Lankesh, who was murdered last week.  The three men who shot her as she arrived home from work have not been traced, and there is no definite proof of who they may have been - but those who knew her well are convinced that her death must have been related to her fierce and honest journalism; and to her activist stance against the power of Hindu nationalism, against the racist ideology of the BJP and its vigilante offshoots, in support of equal rights for the Dalits and the Muslims.  Mari Marcel Thekaekara's Guardian piece deals with the politics very well.  The Hindu right has been given free rein to enact its own idea of justice, and Narendra Modi preserves an ominous, acquiescent silence.  In what claims to be the world's largest democracy, mob rule is permitted.  Have we any idea of just how dangerous our world is becoming?  We stand on the edge of an abyss.

I remember Gauri as a young woman - energetic, attractive, full of wicked humour.  She liked to be in the thick of controversy: the piece she wrote about me in the magazine SUNDAY responded to the way that THE TEMPEST had divided opinion so deeply, with some people embracing its Indian setting and the post-colonial resonances, while others steadfastly refused the connections.  It wasn't a pre-publicity piece: Gauri sought me out after she had seen the piece, precisely because she wanted to engage with the anger it had provoked from conservative voices.  I don't think any of us realised that this cultural controversy was symptomatic of something so much more dangerous, so much more vindictive, something that would become so bloody and so tragic.

Gauri was killed because she dared to speak the truth, and her death makes it all the more incumbent on the survivors to continue that moral quest.  The voice of justice must not be silenced.  It must not.

Brian Friel

Faith Healer (Finbar Lynch as Frank)

I first encountered Brian Friel's plays at University in the 80s.  A friend was in a student production of Translations.  It was not only the first Friel play I had seen, it was also the first post-colonial play.  I was studying history, and had an awareness of the context from with the ongoing Troubles sprang - but this was the first time I had seen theatre engage so powerfully and immediately with that complex shared past, leading its audience to re-assess the present.  At the centre of the play is the question of language, and Friel's theatrical device of delivering the whole text in English (the language of the audience) even when the characters are understood to be speaking Irish, was a glorious revelation.  Here was theatricality and comedy uniting stage and auditorium in an understanding of misunderstanding.  It was, I suppose, my Road to Damascus moment.  I have been travelling that rocky road ever since.

A few years later, I was in Dublin, doing a short period of study at Trinity, and was able to engage much more fully with Friel's work, coming to an understanding of his huge significance, not only as a dramatist, but as a cultural activist.  I read all his plays voraciously, and was lucky enough to see superb productions of Philadelphia, Here I Come (directed by Joe Dowling) and Faith Healer.  The latter would be one of the first plays Border Crossings ever presented, when in 1995-6, Richard Cave's production toured a series of overseas venues, acquiring new resonance and meaning as it responded to widely differing contexts.  The thought of it performing in Cairo seems extraordinary now, but Michael Keneally's review bears witness that, twenty years ago, it really did happen.

But for me, the most important influence of Brian Friel was in the form of the company he created with Stephen Rea, supported by Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin - Field Day.  Inaugurated with Translations in 1980, Field Day was the first contemporary Irish company to operate through the entire island of Ireland: a statement made all the more powerful by the fact that its base, and first performances, were in Derry / Londonderry - a city which at that time was a by-word for The Troubles.  The programming saw the gradual emergence of a clear vision for cultural regeneration.  Productions of Chekov and Molière translated into an Irish idiom, new Irish-English versions of the Greek classics by Heaney and Paulin, new Irish plays and (perhaps most tellingly of all) Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena - all pointed up the centrality of language to meaningful political change.  The company went on to publish a series of pamphlets, starting with Paulin's A New Look at the Language Question, and a Dictionary of Irish English.  The entire project sought to regenerate the post-colonial space through the claiming of literary stature for Irish English, establishing a richer and more resonant language through the public practice of drama, enabling the possibility of new ideas and new expression within the emerging polity.  The heir of Synge and the ally of Fugard, Soyinka, Virahsawmy and Dattani - Brian Friel created a theatre that was genuinely transformative.  I believe that the current Northern Irish peace process owes far more to his endeavours than is acknowledged, and that the Irish future will be forged in the cultural revolution he began.

May he rest in peace.

The Author's Voice / Gaze

Our old friend Mahesh Dattani (pictured) is in London.  My work with him in India was what led to Border Crossings being established in the first place, and his play Bravely Fought the Queen was one of our first productions.  More recently, he was involved as a dramaturg on Re-Orientations.  So it's always a good thing to meet up with him.  Oddly enough, he was speaking yesterday at a conference for Kings College, and the other person on the panel was the South African writer Craig Higginson.  Craig's play Dream of the Dog was one of the pieces I discussed with Janet Suzman the other day - he's a really important voice in modern SA.

What was wonderful about their conversation was the way they overturned the conventional wisdom doled out to writers (and other artists, actually) to "write from experience", to "write what you know".  Writing about yourself, Craig argued, is narcissistic.  Making work about people who are somehow foreign to you, people who are different, is what stretches the writer, and so will stretch the audience.  It requires imagination and empathy.  It moves us out of the comfort zone.

Mahesh agreed completely.  To his way of thinking, there's been far too much concentration on something called a "voice" in the critical discussion of artists.  If we concentrate on finding a "voice", we become limited.  Both of these writers try to do something different, and to sound different, every time they make a new play.  What Mahesh felt was more important than the writer's voice was the writer's gaze - how a writer sees and hears the world.  Much of writing, much of creativity, is actually not to do with making things at all.  It's to do with absorbing things and responding to them.  That's why neither Mahesh nor Craig is didactic in political terms.  As Mahesh said: "It's not my politics that shape my writing - it's my writing that's shaped my politics."

*

The other topic I've been wanting to blog about is not really related to this - but I want to say it anyway.    What has got into opera managements?  I went to see Julius Caesar at the ENO the other night. It's not great.  As so often recently, this was an opera directed by somebody who doesn't direct operas.  In this case, it's a choreographer (a very good one, I may add - but not someone who knows this form).  There have also been film directors, documentary makers, actors, conductors and administrators.  Having directed an opera before seems to be an actual disadvantage in this area.  If Madonna wanted to direct an opera, she could - it would be a press story, right?

What's so odd, and so insulting about this, is that nobody would ever dream of hiring such people to conduct the opera, or to sing it, or play the violin.  Somehow the art of the director is still regarded as the preserve of the imaginative amateur.  Nobody seems to have noticed that it helps to know what you're doing.

I once heard one of these amateurs comment that she could direct opera because she'd been going to see operas for many years.  Well, I've been on a lot of planes.  That doesn't make me a pilot.

An answer to Maureen Lipman

It's taken me a week to get round to doing this - I'm responding to something Maureen Lipman said on last week's Review Show - so you may not be able to see it on i-player any more - but here's the link anyway.

She was talking about a show called Wonderland by Vanishing Point - a devised piece about internet pornography (pictured).  It's a brave and important subject, but I haven't seen the show and I can't really comment on it.  What I can comment on is Maureen's discussion of the devising process.  She talked about devised theatre "getting endless rehearsal time....  while the rest of us have to do with three weeks", and stated that "you get great performances, but you never get a play".

Let's talk about the second point first, because in a way it's more important.  Devised theatre, as it's currently understood in the UK, is quite a new thing.  That's not to say that the form is new, of course - commedia dell'arte, African and Asian forms have depended on improvisation for a very long time - that's why some of the most important devised work to impact on our theatre emanated from Africa (I'm thinking of Sizwe Banzi is Dead, The Island  and Woza Albert! in particular - plays which were possible because of the improvisational skills of African actors - and which I would have thought, as canonical pieces, more than fit the description "a play").  Mike Leigh, who Maureen herself mentioned, was an early pioneer in Britain - though his methods are quite idiosyncratic - and he makes very carefully crafted, wonderfully constructed pieces.

She might have had a point if she'd been talking ten years ago.  Back then, we were making our first devised pieces, like Mappa Mundi.   It was almost an act of faith that we should make the play entirely by improvisation and discussion - I suppose I regarded it as a political statement about equality in intercultural performance. As a result there were Lipmanesque performances and great visuals - but the overall structure seemed lacking.  We weren't the only ones - lots of companies were working in this way, and the results were very much in the world Maureen described.

But not any more.  These days, lots of devising companies collaborate with writers.  We did on Re-Orientations: Mahesh Dattani, Paul Sirett and Brian Woolland were very much part of the process.  It doesn't mean that spontaneous improvisation and multiple voices aren't very much part of the process - in some ways, more so, actually - but we are also stepping back from the improvisations to think about structure, theme, character development and good old story.  The last few days, I've been revisiting improvised material from our spring workshop of Consumed in Shanghai, and comparing it with notes from research, discussions, interviews and feedback.  It's leading to some whole new ideas for the play's development, and also to a serious consolidation of what was achieved.  None of this turns me into a conventional playwright, or invalidates the workshop.  Quite the opposite - the play is made possible by the workshop.  It will be rehearsed (and re-written again - by everybody) early in the New Year.  Watch this space.

This may be what Maureen meant by "they have months of rehearsal time" - though I doubt it.  In fact, our workshop was three weeks long.  The rehearsals won't be much more - we aren't funded to the level where we can work for months, much as we would like to.  I suspect that our devising process is actually cheaper and faster than commissioning a writer and then rehearsing their script.  Not that something being cheap is a measure of anything in the arts, I should add!

Dramaturgy for devised work

As we get closer to the next stage of workshops on the Trilogy, I’m working closely with Brian Woolland on the dramaturgy of the third play (and a bit on the first two as well). It’s a new departure for us to work with a dramaturg – though Mahesh took on this task in Shanghai, and Brian is taking it up now, so we’re making a pretty heavy commitment to the idea. Dramaturgy is the art of mediation between text, rehearsal, theory and cultural / political context. In some cases, it can involve a significant element of writing. With devised work, I’ve often felt that the visual and theatrical aspects can be much stronger than the dramatic, the storytelling, the key conflicts and changes. By bringing in dramaturgical voices, I’m hoping we can redress the balance a bit.

For an experienced playwright, like Brian or Mahesh, the job probably feels quite strange. They are used to working alone, imagining the characters, setting them goals and actions, working out their decisions and the stakes. Here, the characters, and many of the dramatic situations, or at least their theatrical realisations, already exist. The way of beginning this process with Brian was to present him with the DVDs of our improvisations in Shanghai.

On our first day working together, Brian laid down lots of challenges to me about aspects of the work so far which didn’t make sense, which were under-developed, or which simply weren’t dramatically interesting. This led us to pull together a potential new structure. To begin with, Brian wrote this, with lots of new ideas. We batted it backwards and forwards, with me weaving into his storylines for different sets of characters the material from the workshops which I felt to be particularly strong theatrically. Sometimes this led to some very surprising alterations: some scenes which we had made around particular characters turned out to be about different ones.

Today, we’ve been working through it again, asking how the various events in the stories can be about the characters doing things – and how the decisions to do these things can be made more significant to them – raising the stakes and putting obstacles in the way. This has been hugely productive, and has started to make the different storylines intersect far more. Brian has also written one scene (to give two actors a new starting point), and we’ve picked out two more which we think he’ll probably need to write once they’ve been workshopped some more.

It feels like a very exciting way of working. Breeding devised theatre with what writers do best. Nice to feel a distinctive approach emerging for us.

Bullfrog, Tortoise, Jellyfish and Snails

Those are just four of the things I've eaten since being in China. Most of them down to a banquet-like event last night with Zhao Zhigang, the Vice-President of the Yue Opera Company, and, that rare phenomenon, a male Yueju performer. I remember him coming to London a few years back, as part of the In Gesture and Glance season at the Place, when I was just beginning to research this Trilogy. He tells me that it felt a bit odd that he, a man, was being asked to represent the traditionally all-female form, and that he needed to do it as if he were a female xiaosheng performer. All very confusing! The reason for meeting him is to talk through our relationship with the Yue company - Haili has suggested I have a talk with him before meeting the really senior people, since he is very frank. It's helpful to have his advice on strategies and his cautions.

Meanwhile, the workshop moves on very creatively. We had a bit of a dip in the middle of the day, when the room got insanely cold, and we were working on more textual ideas. But there is some terrific stuff emerging. Of our Chinese actors, Qi Bai Xue is beginning to develop the character of Sammy from Dis-Orientations in really endearing and inspiring new directions; and Song Ru Hui is (appropriately enough) taking on Song, and allowing her to become more mature, as she should in her grief and loss. Wang Jue is making a new character, Sammy's sister, and is finding a really strong story around her husband deciding they have to abandon their baby. The husband is being played by Wen Xiao Wei, who is a very physical performer. Today, he and Huang Chen found a wonderful way into a scene of ritualised mourning - beginning as two young lads in a bar telling Julian about rituals, laughing and joking at it perceived old-fashioned absurdity, they slowly began to be taken over by the power of the thing. It's amazingly moving. The scene grows to take in other people - as have most of the really strong pieces in the play so far. It's the simultaneous telling of multiple stories that will make this work really well.

Great to be surrounded by a larger directorial team: Mahesh, Denise, Micha and Ling are all invaluable to me. I wonder how I ever managed devised pieces on my own. Well - maybe I didn't!

And by the way - tortoise is cooked in the shell, which is then smashed. It tastes a bit like runny lamb. Not unpleasant once you get used to it.

Too many words

A fascinating day's devising. I feel I have to find strategies to limit the actors' recourse to words. Even though we are working across languages, it's still very easy to slip into chit-chat in the course of improvisation, rather than initiating actions. I've got a few thoughts about how to do this tomorrow.

I was very struck by the fact that probably the strongest scene today - perhaps the strongest so far - was one with very few words indeed. It's on a plane, with lots of slightly strange characters surrounding PK as she travels from China to India. I built it up slowly, using individual innovations from the cast, and then putting them together. The kind of specifics which work like this places on the improvisation seem to induce much more creativity than vague "a scene about this" direction. I have to learn to trust madness more.

A very strong discussion with the Chinese actors about aspects of the play's potential content. I'm made very aware that it's unusual for them to see both sides of an issue presented in theatre. Here, theatre often makes a very clear moral case, rather than exploring a conflict. We discuss the fact that Chinese culture, since ancient times, has had a concept of collective guilt - so if one Chinese person appears to be bad (in whatever way) on stage, the rest may feel this by implication. Mahesh also points out that we're in danger of conforming to the old paradigm of the Western world looking at Asia, and Asia presenting itself for view. We try to challenge both of these things - but it proves quite difficult to do. The stereotypes seem to be very ingrained in our subconscious minds - we have to jolt them into new perspectives.

Into rhythm

Day 4 of the workshop has ended, and we've established a working rhythm. Each day begins with movement work, led by Denise and Micha. Some of this is experiment and training, some of it is more focused towards potential use in the production(s). Then I will either lead an improvisation exercise for all of us, or (more often) divide the group up to work on distinct areas. Having several directorial types in the workshop makes this a lot simpler. While I work on one section of the piece, Mahesh applies his dramaturgical and directorial skills to another. Today, Denise and Micha were working with a third group. Yesterday, the split was a bit different - some actors worked alone, while Denise was with Mahesh and Micha with me. It seems important to keep rotating who works with whom, although I suspect that Mahesh may naturally acquire more responsibility for Indian storylines, while I work more specifically on Shanghai-based stories. This task has been made a lot easier by the arrival of Huang Ling from Guangzhou. Ling trained as a director in Beijing, and was more recently at Goldsmith's in London, where she met Penny. She's been interested in the project all along - so now it's great to have her in the room, where she can translate and assist to great effect.

The workshop begins

First day workshopping. As usual, I'm terribly nervous before we start, and feel fine once we get underway. We have five Chinese actors in the room: a lady in her forties called Song Ru Hui, a young girl called Wang Jue, and three young men: Wen Xiao Wei, Huang Chen and Qi Bai Xue. Only Xiao Wei has any real fluency in English, which means that they have a tough time watching Orientations on video - but we have to go through this just so we know the basic resources for the work we are doing. Faced with the image of homosexuality on stage in the play, they are more disturbed than they were by simply talking about it being present in the work at the audition. I find myself protesting over-loudly when one of them says that it simply isn't present in traditional Chinese culture. There's clearly a lot of discussion we have to have here.... On the other hand, Ru Hui has worked with Jin Xing, and does a very interesting improvisation around her sex change. Micha and Denise are brilliant in the morning session - finding ways of getting everybody to move like dancers, and at the same time bringing out the cultural differences really clearly. This is why I wanted them on the project - they are incredibly good at facilitating people's movement, in the same way I am trying to facilitate their creativity and acting.

Dinner with Mahesh - like old times. He is, as so often, a veritable litmus paper. Hold him up to something and watch the colour change - he can always tell you what works and what doesn't. He points out several key areas where the first play can grow and develop - either internally or into the third play. He's interested in Linda's relationship with A before the play begins: of course - if we don't see that then we don't know why she would go to such lengths to find him (her). And this will also make more sense of her developing sense of her own orientation. Tori, drawing off her Indian experiences, is also making some mileage here. Mahesh wonders if play 3 should not be set in London - but I rather resist that. I don't want it to feel as if people "come home". It's more intriguing if we set it in lots of places - if this last piece is about opening up the breadth of potential contemporary experience.

I'm glad to say, he goes with me on that one.