A letter from ASHTAR Theatre

Iman Aoun of ASHTAR Theatre in When Nobody Returns

The text below is an open letter from our friends and collaborators at ASHTAR Theatre in Palestine.  Iman Aoun (Artistic Director) and Bayan Shbib have been working with us for the last two months on PLAYS OF LOVE AND WAR: and the company as a whole has been engaged with this project since 2014, most importantly hosting the rehearsals and opening performances of THIS FLESH IS MINE at their Ramallah base.  This is an incredibly important theatre company - one of the most important in the world - and now they really need our support.  

Colleagues and Friends of ASHTAR Theatre
Friends and Supporters of Palestine throughout the World

Ever since its establishment as the first drama teaching institution in 1991, ASHTAR Theatre with both branches in the West Bank and Gaza, gave scores of artistic theatrical presentations that earned a number of local, regional and global prizes. It helped bring Palestine’s message to the whole world in a civilized, humane and refined artistic means. Starting in 2010 ASHTAR Theatre launched an artistic global program designed to bring the voice of Gaza’s children to world forums with a view to lift the siege laid to it entitled the “Gaza Monologues”. We were honored by the participation of a number of theatre companies around the world to this program that ASHTAR Theatre launched in the city of Ramallah and Gaza to tour the world, passing through the United Nations.

In addition, ASHTAR Theatre graduated hundreds of students who gained social and artistic stature. They established new theater companies in the country. ASHTAR Theatre was also active in the introduction of drama in governmental and private as well as UNRWA schools starting in 2002. At the onset of 2012 ASHTAR Theatre administers a long term national programme in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and Higher Education and other bodies with a view to provide training to “drama teachers” in Palestinian elementary schools.

For the last four years, ASHTAR Theatre has been facing dire financial difficulties that bar it from carrying on with its artistic and national journey, unless it obtains material support to offset this financial predicament.

We, at ASHTAR Theatre, administrators, artists, students and graduates contact you, the friends of ASHTAR and of Palestine, beseeching your support to enable keeping our Theatre doors open for the service of our children, our youth and our audiences spread throughout the entire Palestinian Territories. Any financial support geared towards us helps that purpose. Our campaign, today, aims at securing US$ 150,000, the amount of an accumulated deficit represented by the rental of the Theatre premises for the last three years and the operational costs of the institution in both branches, in the West Bank and in Gaza.

Should this amount be secured, it will greatly assist ASHTAR to continue in its existence and proceed with its operations in embarking on new programmes and doubling its presence as an important drama forum in Palestine.

We sincerely appreciate any efforts and contributions made to save this institution from eclipsing and help it maintain alive its message for Palestine.

For those who wish to assist ASHTAR Theatre, please contact us at the following e-mail address to provide you with the means of contribution.

info@ashtar-theatre.org

Best regards to you.
ASHTAR Team and Students

The Theatre under the Motorway

When Nobody Returns - Iman Aoun and David Broughton-Davies

When we first presented This Flesh is Mine, back in 2014, we used all three spaces in ASHTAR Theatre's lovely Ramallah space, and a fabulous London venue called Testbed 1.   We always knew that Testbed would be a one-off: the bulldozers moved in back in January, and it's doubtless well on the way to becoming a set of desirable dwellings.  So we've been resourceful again - and found a space under the Westway, just along from the bar where Elliot Tupac painted his extraordinary mural during Origins 2015.

The bay under the motorway is large.  You can see the concrete slabs that are the foundation of the road above your head.  Our set, which uses two raked stages facing one another, looks as if the road has fallen in and smashed in the space.  Cladding is ripped and incomplete.  Everywhere there is a sense of wreckage and of provisionality.  The perfect space, in other words, for a pair of productions about war and occupation.  Palestine too is a space with far too much wreckage, and a space where everything is provisional and nothing stable or secure.

The great bonus of a found space like this is that it allows us to play to the epic qualities of Brian Woolland's Plays of Love and War at the same time as being very intimate with the audience.  There are some scenes that take place at height and distance - there are others which happen within touching distance of an audience that is never more than four rows deep.  This is fantastic for the thematic concerns of the plays, which move constantly between the personal and the political, as they explore the impact of war and violence on the lives of fragile individuals caught up in the power of global forces.

When Nobody Returns - Bayan Shbib and Andrew French

As well as being large, the space is also unforgiving in terms of sound.  The Westway itself doesn't make much noise - amazingly - but the area around sometimes does, and the concrete space doesn't resonate at all for voices.  So we have had to develop a sound design solution, and actually this too has become a contributor to meaning.  The actors have been brilliantly miked by Hannu Kuosmanen, and Dave Carey has created an almost continuous soundscape into which their treated voices are injected.  Often you don't even realise there is artificial sound - but there is enough to counteract the motorway and to generate an ambience that supports the voices.  Hannu's mixing of the quadrophonic speakers allows the vocal sound to seem to be coming directly from the actors' mouths, even when they are very close to you.

The space is full of challenges of course - but challenges are often what lead to brilliant creativity and to exciting solutions. The audience and the reviewers have certainly loved this space.  In fact - I find it very hard to imagine how the plays could be done in a conventional theatre....

More info and booking links here!

Palestinian approaches to plays

When Nobody Returns - Iman Aoun as Penelope

In a talk we did on Saturday, between the two Plays of Love and War, Palestinian writer Ahmed Masoud suggested that Palestinian theatre-makers have a very distinct approach to dramaturgy and playwriting.  The reason there are no famous Palestinian playwrights, he said, was not that there are no good writers, but that they work collaboratively with actors and directors.  Perhaps, we speculated, this has something to do with the huge importance of building community in Palestine.  And perhaps it also relates to the resistance to authority that comes with that community's oppression.

On one level, this collaborative approach to dramaturgy is very close to what we have been evolving at Border Crossings for some time - we balance devised work with authored plays, and we deliberately work with writers like Brian Woolland who have a collaborative approach to authorship and are open to changes, sometimes very radical changes, as a result of the rehearsal process.  Brian has already written about the evolution of the plays on the dedicated blog.

Working on these plays has been even more complex than we're used to rehearsals being - and I found Ahmed's comments very helpful in understanding what we've been engaged with.  For a Palestinian company like Ashtar, there is a huge political meaning in every action that we present on stage.  It is not enough that something is dramatically potent or psychologically truthful - there is always the sense that the audience will read something in relation to their position under occupation and the way they respond to that.  So, when a character emerges from warfare covered in blood, that could be read as suggesting he is a maniac - a smaller amount of blood suggests he is engaged in violence at a level where he can retain some rationality.  It's very complicated and nuanced.

Time and again in rehearsals we have found ourselves asking "What are we actually trying to say?"  In many situations, I would regard the question as invalid - if we could say what we wanted to say, we wouldn't need the play, with its ambiguities and contradictions, through which to say it.  But, in this case, it was very often exactly the right question, because it allowed us to weigh our actions and decisions in relation to the wider political context.  What will the audience - this UK audience in London - feel about the Middle East and our own role there at the end of these performances?

Tomorrow is press night.  After that, we may know the answer.

You can book by clicking here!

Rehearsing Plays of Love and War

This Flesh is Mine - Gerrard McArthur and Iman Aoun

After more than two years, we are back in the extraordinary mythic world of Brian Woolland's Homeric plays.  This Flesh is Mine, which we co-produced with Palestine's ASHTAR Theatre in 2014, was one of the finest pieces we have ever done - acclaimed by the press and by its audiences in both Ramallah and London.  Now we're bringing it back, together with a fantastic new companion piece called When Nobody Returns.   It's an Odyssey to go with the Iliad of This Flesh is Mine.

If anything, the new play is even more complex, unstable, politically engaged and emotionally charged than This Flesh is Mine.  It's benefitted from the company - including Brian - being able to spend time in the West Bank when we rehearsed the first piece there, and from the opportunity to develop the script in dialogue with other theatre-makers from the Middle East, as well as the military families we encountered at Salisbury Playhouse last year.  Brian's written very eloquently about the writing process on the dedicated blog.  

I never used to like The Odyssey.  It seemed to me a fairytale, rather silly after the great themes of The Iliad.  It was nice to be proved wrong.  As Brian worked on the script, it became more and more clear that the famous bits of the epic are actually the bits about spin - stories at one remove from the real story.  At the heart of Homer's poem is a hero's long-delayed return to free a land that is under occupation.  It is this aspect of the Odyssey - so resonant with the Palestinian situation - that has inspired When Nobody Returns.

We've been incredibly lucky to get almost all the original cast back - and they will be performing in both plays, on the same set.  Andrew French, who was so compelling and passionate as Achilles, will also play Odysseus in the new play.  Iman Aoun, the Artistic Director of ASHTAR, returns as Hecuba, and plays Odysseus' wife Penelope - weaving her tapestry as she awaits his return, in what Iman has called an act of cultural resistance.  Gerrard McArthur is Priam and Antinous, the leader of the suitors for Penelope's hand;while David Broughton-Davies plays two brothers - Agamemnon in the first play and Menelaus in the second.  Tariq Jordan, who was so exciting as Hector and Patroclus in This Flesh is Mine, has the key role of Telemakhos - the son of Odysseus and Penelope, who has never known his father, and is now the age Odysseus was when he set sail for Troy.  

The one new cast member is another actress from ASHTAR.  Bayan Shbib has been seen in London before - she played the Queen when ASHTAR brought Richard II  to the Globe to Globe Festival.  She also has an extraordinary personal history: born in Syria, she now lives in Austria, where she has been working in theatre for refugees.  And, of course, this is another theme that resonates powerfully through the new play: after the war, there are displaced people on the seas.  

It's going to be an exciting few weeks.  We open October 21st. And here's a booking link!