Tron
Theatre, Glasgow
3 stars When a microphone is passed out to the audience in the second half of Egyptian playwright and director Laila Soloman’s all too personal set of testimonies from the frontline of her homeland’s revolution, the effect is both moving and powerful. As each reads from a sheet of paper demanding justice for named ‘martyrs of the revolution’ killed by one form of state oppression or another, the communal litany that gradually forms is a very quiet form of solidarity that challenges the oppressors even as it bears witness. The first half that precedes it finds three Egyptian actors – one man, two women - sitting on chairs recounting their own knitted together experiences without fuss or anger in their native language as English subtitles flash up on a screen behind them. An everyday tale of Molotov cocktails, incarceration, military brutality and bombs made of tea, there is little need for dramatic embellishment in Soliman’s compendium of first-hand testimonies from three lives captured beyond the heroic newsreel footage flickering behind. This is real enough, as is the fact that company composer Mustafa Said was unable to take part in the production after being refused a visa. It is a stark and unflinching form of documentary theatre Soliman utilises in this Mayfesto companion piece to A Play, A Pie and A Pint’s One Day in Spring season of work by young writers from Arab countries. As the title suggests, these first two pieces in an ongoing series strip things back to a rough and ready pop-up staging that has little truck with flashy artifice, preferring instead to focus on the chillingly necessary evocation of the here and now. The Herald, May 7th 2012 ends
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