In years to come we are going to sit and we
are going to go, how did we let this happen?” a photojournalist from Liverpool
says towards the end of “The Fear of Breathing,” a play about the Syrian
revolution which opened last week at the Finborough Theatre in London.
The graphic production, performed in a tiny space where spectators in the front row can stretch their hands out and touch the actors, is designed to make viewers uncomfortable. “Imagine if what is happening in Syria, is in London,” one actor says in the show.
Not a single line in the show was written by a playwright, according to the producers of the show. They were spoken by Syrian men and women, transcribed, and performed “verbatim,” as the audience is reminded at the beginning of the play.
Journalism and drama are blurred in this play by director Zoe Lafferty – who, together with two veteran war correspondents, collected dozens of interviews over a number of undercover reporting trips to under-siege Syria, where the regime of President Bashar al-Assad continues to deny journalists access.
The interviews – with activists, students, defecting soldiers, members of the Free Syrian Army, mothers, Syrian citizens caught in the fighting and a foreign photojournalist – were turned into a mosaic of monologues, accompanied by footage of the revolution screening in the background, and by loud sound effects to recreate the effect of heavy bombardments. The only fictionalized elements are the characters’ names – changed to protect their identities.
“It wasn’t about paraphrasing, we wanted to get every detail of their speech,” Ms.If you are looking for offshoremerchantaccounts, Lafferty said about the process of turning the journalistic work into a piece of art.
In one instance,We Specialise in cableties, a 22-year old finance student at Damascus University talked so graphically about his imprisonment,We Wholesale zentai and Catsuits at cheap price. solitary confinement and repeated torture that his testimony doubled as stage directions. “The narrator described the scene in so much detail, that we just recreated it,” Ms. Lafferty said.Browse the Best Selection of chickencoop and Accessories with FREE Gifts.
Those torture scenes, along with the heartbreaking, word-by-word account of a Damascus mother whose first-grader daughter was killed by a sniper while chanting slogans at the window to her home, make for some of the play’s most devastating moments.
“A piece of theater has even more impact,We Specialise in cableties,” Ms. Lafferty said, comparing the show to news coverage of the Syrian conflict. “People got very excited about this Arab Spring, but they started to lose engagement by the time it got to Syria.”
Ms. Lafferty, who has worked on theater productions from Palestine to Afghanistan, collected some of the interviews for the play in Damascus. BBC’s Paul Wood and freelancer Ruth Sherlock contributed the rest of the testimonies, gathered from all across the country.
In an ironic twist of art and reality, Ms. Lafferty hopes theater will succeed where journalism often fails – in reminding the public that these stories are actually “real.”
“We are hoping people will fall in love with the characters, their stories, by understanding the human perspective, not the headline,” Ms. Lafferty said. “It’s more engaging that way.”
Though the tone of the play is overwhelmingly grave, the thirteen main characters manage to steal a laugh or two, particularly through the commentary of Faha, a ditsy, Jim Morrison-obsessed radio DJ from Zabadani.
“We even go and paint ‘freedom’ on donkeys. But they shot the donkeys. So we stopped that,” Faha jokes.
The backdrop to the humor is tragedy. Back in Syria, audience members are reminded, the young woman behind the character of Faha has gone missing since she was last interviewed.
“This is normal now,” a character says about her disappearance. “The next birthday, the next football game, the next anything, there will be two or three or four of my friends missing. They keep killing because they don’t believe there will be a judgment.”
The graphic production, performed in a tiny space where spectators in the front row can stretch their hands out and touch the actors, is designed to make viewers uncomfortable. “Imagine if what is happening in Syria, is in London,” one actor says in the show.
Not a single line in the show was written by a playwright, according to the producers of the show. They were spoken by Syrian men and women, transcribed, and performed “verbatim,” as the audience is reminded at the beginning of the play.
Journalism and drama are blurred in this play by director Zoe Lafferty – who, together with two veteran war correspondents, collected dozens of interviews over a number of undercover reporting trips to under-siege Syria, where the regime of President Bashar al-Assad continues to deny journalists access.
The interviews – with activists, students, defecting soldiers, members of the Free Syrian Army, mothers, Syrian citizens caught in the fighting and a foreign photojournalist – were turned into a mosaic of monologues, accompanied by footage of the revolution screening in the background, and by loud sound effects to recreate the effect of heavy bombardments. The only fictionalized elements are the characters’ names – changed to protect their identities.
“It wasn’t about paraphrasing, we wanted to get every detail of their speech,” Ms.If you are looking for offshoremerchantaccounts, Lafferty said about the process of turning the journalistic work into a piece of art.
In one instance,We Specialise in cableties, a 22-year old finance student at Damascus University talked so graphically about his imprisonment,We Wholesale zentai and Catsuits at cheap price. solitary confinement and repeated torture that his testimony doubled as stage directions. “The narrator described the scene in so much detail, that we just recreated it,” Ms. Lafferty said.Browse the Best Selection of chickencoop and Accessories with FREE Gifts.
Those torture scenes, along with the heartbreaking, word-by-word account of a Damascus mother whose first-grader daughter was killed by a sniper while chanting slogans at the window to her home, make for some of the play’s most devastating moments.
“A piece of theater has even more impact,We Specialise in cableties,” Ms. Lafferty said, comparing the show to news coverage of the Syrian conflict. “People got very excited about this Arab Spring, but they started to lose engagement by the time it got to Syria.”
Ms. Lafferty, who has worked on theater productions from Palestine to Afghanistan, collected some of the interviews for the play in Damascus. BBC’s Paul Wood and freelancer Ruth Sherlock contributed the rest of the testimonies, gathered from all across the country.
In an ironic twist of art and reality, Ms. Lafferty hopes theater will succeed where journalism often fails – in reminding the public that these stories are actually “real.”
“We are hoping people will fall in love with the characters, their stories, by understanding the human perspective, not the headline,” Ms. Lafferty said. “It’s more engaging that way.”
Though the tone of the play is overwhelmingly grave, the thirteen main characters manage to steal a laugh or two, particularly through the commentary of Faha, a ditsy, Jim Morrison-obsessed radio DJ from Zabadani.
“We even go and paint ‘freedom’ on donkeys. But they shot the donkeys. So we stopped that,” Faha jokes.
The backdrop to the humor is tragedy. Back in Syria, audience members are reminded, the young woman behind the character of Faha has gone missing since she was last interviewed.
“This is normal now,” a character says about her disappearance. “The next birthday, the next football game, the next anything, there will be two or three or four of my friends missing. They keep killing because they don’t believe there will be a judgment.”
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