Glasgow project uses stage play to explore experience of Syrian refugees

The men and women will start the process of mounting a new production of an Ancient Greek tragedy. 

None of them have ever acted before, many have never been to a theatre. None know anything about the play.

The play they will perform is Euripides’ searing anti-war tragedy The Trojan Women. 

First shown in Athens in 415 BC, it is set on the morning after the fall of Troy. 

All the men have been killed, and the women are waiting to be sent into slavery. 

They are in a row of tents outside the walls of their home city which is about to be torched by the victorious Greeks. 

READ MORE: Thistle star to kick off refugee week

It is a dark take on the most famous myth of the Ancient World from Ancient Greece’s most controversial playwright.

Athens at the time was in the middle of its 27 year long war against Sparta. 

The previous year it had committed an appalling atrocity against the neutral island of Melos – a democracy like itself – slaughtering the men and selling the women and children into slavery. 

This play was a slap in the face of Athenian audiences. It tells of the horror of war from the victims’ perspective, and by association humanised the enemies of Athens.

The Syria Trojan Women Project updates the story. 

It was created and run by my wife Charlotte Eagar, a journalist and foreign correspondent, and myself, a writer and fellow filmmaker, five years ago. 

We first mounted a production of The Trojan Women with Syrian refugee non-actors in 2013 in Jordan. 

Into the ancient text the cast wrote their own stories of loss and exile. 

The juxtaposition of the two showed not only Euripides’ timeless genius, but also the immediacy of the cast’s own real stories of war and the effects of war. It was a great success, and news of it went round the world.

The project works in two ways. The act of workshopping their stories in a sympathetic group setting helps the refugees to deal with the depression and isolation that comes with losing everything – home, community, family, work – and living in the curious limbo of refugee existence.

What was surprising was how strongly the cast identified with the characters in the original play when we gave them the scripts.

Secondly, it is a powerful way to bring the stories of those refugees in front of audiences of the country they had fled to, as well as to a wider international audience – to remind the world of why the people of Syria have had flee. 

READ MORE: Using skills of refugee dentists helps Scottish NHS fill the gaps

Sanaa Mohammad lives in Glasgow. She left Syria after the school where she taught was brutally attacked by the Syrian Army.

“This is a way for us to tell what has happened to us,” she said.

“In Middle Eastern culture there is no traditional way of sharing this psychological pain, but we need to talk about these things to help us deal with the effects of war.”

Over 12 million people have had to abandon their homes in Syria since the war began in 2012 – and half of those live as refugees outside the country.

In 2016 we mounted a tour of the UK with some of the original cast, backed by the Young Vic theatre and Developing Artists, and directed by Zoe Lafferty.

Renamed Queens of Syria, it met with standing ovations and five star reviews and played in front of audiences that included Dame Diana Rigg, Julie Christie and Cate Blanchett.

This time we wanted to do a whole new production with Syrians living in the UK. Over the last year, we had been running radio drama projects for Syrians in Germany and Scotland, and it was during one of these in Glasgow that the idea formed. 

Glasgow is the top resettlement city per head of population for Syrians in the UK. We got an immediate and enthusiastic response from Glasgow City Council and Refuweegee, the local NGO welcoming asylum seekers into the city. 

We are working with them to realise this production. 

We really wanted to make this a local community project, to be owned by new Glaswegians and old Glaswegians alike. 

The Glasgow-based director Vickie Beesley, of the community theatre company Terra Incognita, will be directing the production. 

We are also in co-production with Platform, the brilliant theatre in Easterhouse. 

I was born in Glasgow, and have always been proud of that. For the last few months we have been talking to Syrians who have settled in Glasgow.

Some were from our radio project, others we met at Iftar dinners held as they broke their month long daylight fast of Ramadan – a gruelling 20 hours in the Scottish summer. 

To our relief, there has been an enthusiastic response. 

The support is coming from a variety of public and private sources, including the UNHCR, Platform and Glasgow City Council. We’re still looking for donations and corporate sponsorship.

The project runs in two parts: firstly there will be once a week drama classes for six months running every Wednesday, with a crèche for the participants’ children. In January, we will rehearse and write a new version of The Trojan Women, opening at Platform in the first week in February. 

READ MORE: Syrian refugee schoolboy Mohammed is off to sunny Spain thanks to MP Joanna Cherry's intervention

We hope to go to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe next summer.

Audiences will see that Syrian refugees are ordinary people just like them to whom extraordinary things have happened. 

We hope it will draw Syrians closer to their local communities, and help people here understand that it could be us instead having to run for our lives, but for our good luck to be in a safe place at a safe time.