When the wave of protests that resulted in the Arab Spring swept
through Middle Eastern countries throughout the early part of 2011, the
mass unrest saw oppresive governments in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and
Yemen overthrown. While the unrest continues elsewhere, the new
possibilities such actions have opened up have been seized on by young
people throughout the Arab world.
Some of this ongoing creative energy is captured in the One Day in
Spring season, a series of new plays by young Arab writers seen over a
six week period as part of Oran Mor's A Play, A Pie and A Pint season
of lunchtime theatre. As curated by playwright David Greig and
partnered by the National Theatre of Scotland in association with the
Tron Theatre's Mayfesto season, One Day in Spring highlights a set of
vital voices caught in the crossfire of a brand new landscape, as Greig
explains.
“For about ten years I've been going back and forth between here and
the Middle East working with young playwrights in Syria, Egypt and
elsewhere,” he says. “As these playwrights developed, I wanted their
work to be seen. There were readings at the Royal Court and in New
York, but I really wanted these plays to be seen in Scotland, and it
became my personal quest. You have to bear in mind that these young
playwrights are different from playwrights in America or even Brazil,
because they were not able to get their plays on. This is for a
multitude of reasons, censorship being the primary one, but for
economic reasons and others. Yet they were forming writers groups, and
responding to the idea of new playwriting with real vigour and
enthusiasm.
“It seemed generational. Whichever country I went to, there would be
young men and women in their twenties, young intellectuals who were
aware of the internet and twitter, but not in thrall to America, but
were accidentally certain of their identity. At the same time they were
being squashed by a number of pressures. They were being squashed by
dead regimes on top of them, and by Islamism coming up on the other
side and wanting to roll back some of the social freedoms they had, and
were also being squashed by the west, who for the first decade of this
centuey has regarded these countries as a breeding ground for
terrorism.
“So the energy of this generation of writers is really intense. I never
thought it would go anywhere, and I don't think they did either, but it
became obvious that this generation had caught flame in a particular
way. There are great established Arab plays that haven't been seen
here, but this needed to be rougher and rawer and younger than that.
These aren't well-buffed, tried and tested pieces. They are rough. Some
are direct political responses, and two are made by and for activism by
someone who is very involved in the Syrian uprising. There's an urgency
in these works that we wanted to showcase.”
More established voices do make an appearance in Dear Glasgow, the
second show of the season, which brings together words by seven
distinguished poets, novelists and essayists fronm the Arab world,
including Raja Shehadah and Adhaf Souief. Each one has been
commissioned to pen personal responses to events in their country,
which will be performed by equally elder statesperson-like Scottis
actors under thev directorial eye of Oran Mor supremo David MacLennan.
The season kicks off with Can You Please Look At The Camera, by
Mohammed Al Attar from Damascus, which charts the plight of a young
woman recording the testimonies of her fellow Syrians in the midst of
the Syrian revolution. Hadda and Hassan Lekliches! By the Rabat-based
writer Jaouad Essouani is a monologue asddressed to god by a Moroccan
everywoman. Also from Damascus, Abdullah Alkafri's Damascus Aleppo
features a psychiatrist councelling a man who claims to have been
having a relationshp with the psychiatrist's homosexual son, who has
disappeared. Lebanese writer Abdelrahim Alawji's work is showcased by
Sleeping Beauty Insomnia, in which two strangers seek shelter from an
Israeli attack in a bombed-out theatre with only the body of a dead
woman for company. These will be directed by Scots stalwarts Catrin
Evans, Ben Harrison, Philip Howard and Graham Eatough.
Over at the Tron, meanwhile, No Time For Art is a series of documentary
performances by Laila Soliman and Mustafa Said which look at police and
miltary violence in Egypt. While the first of this year's Five Minute
Theatre events presented by the NTS following last year's twenty-four
hour extravaganza of brand new miniatures will feature protest as its
theme, the finale of the One day in Spring Season will be an eponymous
compendium of work directed by Greig himself. This will bring together
some twenty-four writers, each capturing a moment in time over the
course of a day, all in a fifty-minute whole in which two Egyptian
actors will attempt to convey the sort of urgency Greig identifies, all
to a soundtrack of hip to the minute club music from Beirut, Tunis and
Cairo.
Middle eastern influences have trickled into Greig's own work for some
time now, from his adaptation of Palestinian human rights lawyer Raja
Shehada's memoir, When The Bulbul Stopped Singing, in 2004, to his own
full length play, Damascus, in 2007, both for the Traverse. Another
Shehada adaptation, An Imagined Sarha, appeared as part of the Tron's
Mayfesto strand in 2010.
“It's only since I started going to the middle east that it started
feeding into my work,” he says. “I think it was the energy of these
young people that made me interested, because I think I saw in them,
nyself not that long ago. When I started going I was just past thirty,
and there were all these twenty-two and twenty-three year olds trying
to make theatre, but where we'd had everything laid out before us, even
the idea of having a career as a writer over there was pretty much
unheard of. But there was a hunger and a thirst, and to be a young
writer in 1996 was a terrific thing.
“There was a theatre scene,there then, but it felt like we were
ignoring it. It also felt, and this is a tricky political area, though
not as much as it was five years ago, but it also felt like it wasn't
just the west ignoring these younger wtiters, but that they were being
ignored there as well. Now it's much clearer to see that there was
something waiting to pop, and now it's popped, the consequences of that
are unknowable. One thing I want the One Day in Spring Season to say is
that these writers are here, and that these are the people we should be
listening to.”
A Play, A Pie and A Pint: One Day in Spring Season opens at Oran Mor on
April 16th with Would You Please Look At The Camera, with plays opening
over the next six weeks before transferring to the Traverse Theatre,
Edinburgh. Five Minite Theatre: Protest, No Time For Art is at The Tron
Theatre, Glasgow, May 4th-5th.
www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/
The Herald, April 10th 2012
ends
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