A powerful plea for simple kindness to war survivors
THEATRE
Revolution Days
Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh ✪✪✪✪
Maryland
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (rehearsed reading)
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; and to be young, was very heaven,” wrote William Wordsworth of his experience of the French Revolution of 1789. It’s because of the blissful intensity of those moments of uprising and hope – the music, the brilliant graffiti and graphics, the humour, the intense sense of equality and shared humanity among all the different groups represented in the movement – that nothing crushes the soul like a revolution defeated, or gone wrong.
Mariem Omari’s solo play Revolution Days, seen briefly in Edinburgh and Glasgow this week, is a powerful and heartbreaking monologue, based on her experience as a humanitarian worker in the Middle East during the so-called “Arab Spring” ten years ago, and performed by Raghad Chaar, who herself arrived in Scotland from Syria at the age of two, in the 1990s. The 70-minute play – backed by powerful projected footage of the time, designed by Lewis den Hertog – tells the story of Samira, an idealistic young Muslim woman from Glasgow who travels to the Middle East to work as a human rights witness for the UN and then Médecins Sans Frontières, and is confronted by the relentless poverty and oppression that led to the revolutions, and the violence that follows them, including the sexual violence that emerges unbidden and sickeningly from within the revolutionary movements themselves.
Omari’s play, directed by Shilpa T Hyland, struggles restlessly and fascinatingly with what are perhaps unanswerable questions about the appropriate response to such horrors, from those of us who live far from current conflict zones; on one level Samira is doing what she can, on anothershefeelsuseless,anaiveand patronising do-gooder amid a world of pain. And if the pace of the script and performance flag a little towards the end – when Samira’s health breaks down, and she tries to understand the impact of these witnessed horrors on her mind and body – Revolution Days remains a vivid, complex and unforgettably challenging show. It links our lives here in Scotland to the profound pain of the world we live in, and requires of us, in this week aboveall,thatweatleastshow somemeasureofhumankindness and welcome, to the survivors of these horrors who arrive on our shores.
This week of refugee crisis also marked Thursday’s UN day for the elimination of violence against women. The Traverse Theatre responded to the occasion by staging threerehearsedreadings–not forreview–ofleadingukplaywright Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland, her furious 30 minuteresponse to this year’s murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens. The playalsoreferencesthecaseof Bibaahenryandnicolesmallman, the sisters murdered in a London park, whose bodies were later photographed and jokingly posted on Whatsapp by police officers.
Essentially,theshowtellsthe story of two Marys (Rehanna Macdonaldandelspethturner)rapedbythesameman,and their visit to the police station to give evidence, which takes a chilling turn. The real power of the play, though – directed bykolbrunbjortsigfusdottir– liesintheinterweavingoftheir story with commentary from a six-strong chorus of Furies, who satirise, warn and sometimes shriek their horror at the violence women still suffer, day after day. Maryland is a short text, but a vital one, reflecting the rage and sorrow of the past year. It should be seen as often is necessary, until we see a change in all the cultures that encourage such attitudestowomen,andthereforefinallycolludeinsuchhorrifying acts.